Essentials of Chinese Traditional Literature

Author: Wang Xiaoshu, Editor-in-Chief
Publisher:
Publishing Date: July 1, 2002
Features: The fundamental principle of selecting works for this book is centered on aesthetics. In other words, it aims to provide readers with a light and joyful reading experience, selecting, filtering, highlighting, and connecting classics from thousands of years of literary history based on the principle of beauty. Although only 109 works are included, they are essentially the most artistically moving and outstanding works from each era—beautiful essays, fine poems, renowned prose, and beloved excerpts from novels that have excited, nourished, and shaped countless generations of Chinese people, becoming the very spiritual essence of our nation. This is the book's most prominent feature. Achieving this is not as easy as it may seem. The ancient notion of literature serving as a vehicle for moral instruction regarded literature as something grand and burdensome, concerning personal reputation, ancestral honor, and even the fate of the nation. Let alone this, in recent decades, scholars have repeatedly reevaluated and discarded the legacy of our ancestors through political and ideological lenses, prioritizing moral and political significance, the dissemination of knowledge and culture, while neglecting and setting aside people's appreciation for beauty. As a result, ordinary readers have become disconnected from the lives of our ancestors and have misinterpreted and held prejudices against the literary heritage. In recent years, short essays by Lin Yutang, Zhou Zuoren, and others, which appraised ancient works with an eye toward "lightness" and "purity," became quite popular. To some extent, they can be seen as a reaction against the excessive "heaviness" and "substance" of literary history. The combination of selected works and literary history is the book's second feature. While reading famous works alone can bring aesthetic pleasure, it can also make one linger among towering trees but fail to see the lush forest. The editor-in-chief has categorized the selected works into eight themes: "Grand Humanistic Sentiment," "Magnanimous Wei-Jin Spirit," "Bold Atmosphere of a Golden Age," "Deep and Gentle Poetic Emotion," "Melancholic National Concern," "Passionate Love and Ideals," "Heroic and Tragic Spirit," and "Sincere Literary Soul." These themes, derived from literary creations of specific historical periods, highlight the dominant aesthetic trends and attitudes of each era. The concise selection, detailed annotations, prompts, and summaries for each theme give the book a lively and accessible function as a literary history. Although it is merely a brief outline and explanation, it creates connections, links, and causality among the well-known and beloved masterpieces in the readers' eyes, making them shimmering jewels and surging peaks in the river of beauty. Whether readers skim through it casually or seek a general understanding and grasp of traditional literature, they will "come for what they hear and leave with what they see." This is a successful effort by the compilers to cater to the comprehension level and reading expectations of beginners.