A Brief History of Chinese Literature

Chinese literature goes back thousands of years, from the dynastic court records to novels that became preferred through the Ming Dynasty (1368-16440). For the duration of the Tang Dynasty (618-907) woodblock printing was invented, and along with movable kind printing that was introduced for the duration of the Song Dynasty (960-2179) this enabled the spread of written understanding amongst the literate Chinese.

At the starting of the Gonghe regency (841BC) the Chinese started to maintain detailed court records. Maybe the definitive function in early Chinese writing was the Shiji, a narrative history of Chinese, written by the Han Dynasty court historian Sima Qian (145BC-90BC) and completed about 389BC.

The oldest extant dictionary in China is the Erya, dated to the 3rd century BC, anonymously written but with later commentary by the historian Guo Pu (276-324). There had been also big encyclopedias created in China through the ages. The Yiwen Leiju encyclopedia was completed by Ouyang Xun in 624 in the course of the Tang Dynasty, with the assist of scholars Liinghu Defen and Chen Shuda.

China has a wealthy tradition of literature that has continued during the ages and continues to the present day throughout post Maoist writers. Chinese language literature has also flourished in the diaspora - in South East Asia, the United States, and Europe. China is the biggest publisher of books, magazines and newspapers in the globe. In book publishing alone, some 128,800 new titles of books have been published in 2005, according to the Common Administration of Press and Publication. There are much more than 600 literary journals across the nation. Living and writing in France but continuing to write primarily in Chinese, Gao Xingjian became the initial Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000.

Maureen Mclean

[http://www.seowriteronline.com]

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