LARB's China Channel Looks at How to Read Chinese Literature

At Los Angeles Review of Books's new China Channel,  Yunte Huang introduces readers to a series of ten books published by Columbia University Press aiming to "promote the teaching and learning of premodern Chinese poetry, fiction, drama, prose and literary theory." The series is organized by Professor Zong-qi Cai, of Lingnan University in Hong Kong and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Huang writes, "At a time of increasing global demand for the study of all things Chinese, this series is a timely exploration of innovative ways to overcome traditional barriers for learning." From there: 

The first two books, How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology and How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook, which combine cream-of-the-crop scholarship with prime selections of texts from major genres and writers, have been well received by teachers, students and general readers alike. The new installment, How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity Through the Tang, constitutes the third book of the series, and the only one devoted exclusively to the rich, fantastical, labyrinthine matrix of poetry-making in ancient China. As such, it is both a gem of fresh scholarship and a compendium of luminous insights.

It may come as no surprise to scholars well versed in Sinology, but the central thesis that emerges from this eclectic collection of essays bears repeating: poetry played a unique, indispensable role in the making of Chinese culture. Percy Shelley’s romantic hyperbole that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” would have been a shrewd ethnographic description of ancient China, if we were to delete the word “unacknowledged.” As Cai puts it in his succinct preface to the volume, poetry indeed permeated every corner and layer of Chinese society: in the public arena, poetry played a key role in diplomacy, court politics, empire building, state ideology and education; in the private sphere, poetry was used by people of different social classes “as a means of gaining entry into officialdom, creating self-identity, fostering friendship, and airing grievances.”

Learn more at LARB's China Channel.