“Text and Commentary: The Early Tradition"

2009

Asian folklore studies, 1997

This article represents an attempt to re-examine the tradition of classical literary tales in China, understanding them not as "literature" but as products of amateur oral storytelling that took place in elite circles. Evidence abounds of such stories being initially circulat-ed ...

This paper discusses selections of each region's representative poetry (including songs, lyrical works, and long-form poems) and short stories (including some religious and philosophical literature) from ancient or classical eras through to contemporary published efforts, detailing first, the historical evolution of their literatures, and then attempting to find commonalities in literatures as seen through elements of shared culture. There are likely thousands of academic papers comparing and contrasting Western and Nonwestern literature, exploring ancient songs and hymns, classical poems and epics, to early parables and short stories, anthologies and even novels. Many of these studies focus on the differences between cultural literary efforts, spending a considerable amount of time detailing how Western literary theory and creative forms have irrevocably altered traditional Nonwestern cultural creative styles and literary voices. Rather than retread this well-stamped ground, this essay focuses on comparing and contrasting poetic and short-form narrative styles of the Far East (specifically China) and South Asia (specifically India). This paper discusses selections of each region's representative poetry (including songs, lyrical works, and long-form poems) and short stories (including some religious and philosophical literature) from ancient or classical eras through to modern published efforts of the 20th Century, detailing first, the historical evolution of their literatures, and then attempting to find commonalities in literatures as seen through elements of shared culture.

2024

In the tide of globalization, cross-cultural communication and understanding is particularly important. As an important part of culture, the narrative mode of literature not only reflects the thinking habits of a nation, but also is the key to understanding different cultures. As we all know, narrative is an indispensable part of literature in both China and the West. Narrative is not only a simple description of events, but also a kind of art, a way to construct the relationship between time and space through language. Although the form of expression and emphasis may vary, this point is reflected in both Chinese and Western literature.

This paper is a structuralist analysis of narrative poetry in the Book of Songs (Shijing), focusing on poems 245 and 58. It argues about the lose of narrativity and the rise of lyricism in early Chinese literature.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2012

The first words often said to a child when he or she begins to try to speak are " Tell us story then, " or something similar. From our earliest years we are exposed to story and most children lucky enough to be brought up in loving families, no matter where on our planet, are told stories to help them go to sleep. Thus, the start of the socialization process, the acquisition of language itself, is intricately bound up with the idea of story. This central role of story repeats itself in all forms of creative art, music, song, dance and the visual arts, whether as inspiration or some aspect of illustration or reference. In those cultures where traditional storytelling survives, and that includes Scotland, Ireland and certainly parts of England and Wales, the role of story is absolutely key to how culture has developed over millennia. As J. Isaacs has shown (1980) some of the stories in Australia, referring to giant marsupials, initially dismissed by the western-educated mind as nonsense, fabrication or drink-induced fantasy, were shown to be true in the 1950s when the bones of such animals were found close by human hearth fires and showed signs of both having been butchered and cooked. These bones were found while digging for bauxite, the raw element from which aluminium is made, and the clear stratigraphy allowed the remains to be dated at 40,000 BCE. This means that the dreamtime stories of giant animals, newly classified last century as Diprodotons, had been passed orally for 40 millennia. While it is true that native art in Australia does contain symbolic visual referents that are linked to the telling of, and probably remembering of, stories, the aboriginal peoples had no alphabet and thus no written literature. Nothing surviving in literature has anything like this dateable antiquity. Stories survive. Why do they survive? One example of a widely known story is that of King Arthur, his Queen Guinevere and Modred, his nephew, or in some versions, his illegitimate son. This story was told in many locations throughout the British Isles and beyond but attained its best-known form as a result of the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the first half of the twelfth century, and Thomas Malory whose Morte d'Arthur was published n 1485. In the best-known tale, Arthur leaves a kingdom or nation at peace while he goes off to Rome on a pilgrimage, a well-attested habit of Christian kings. He leaves his queen in charge but she immediately takes up with Modred, and they usurp the throne. Arthur hears of this on his journey to Rome and returns to raise an army against the usurpers. In the Battle of Camlaan he kills Modred but receives an apparently fatal blow himself. He is visited on the battlefield by Morgan and her eight sisters who come from the Isle of Avalon. They then return to the Isle of 1 Story here is taken to mean all material used in the process of storytelling no matter its origin.

2024

The narrative thinking in Chinese literature has an undeniable value and has a certain inspiration for the study of character studies. This article aimed to compare narrative ideas from the perspective of Chinese and Western literature. This article explored China's two different temporal and spatial characteristics and of the West, one by one, and summarized the commonalities and differences of narrative thinking and methods of time and space through the analysis of different regions, different literature, different religions and different philosophical factors. This article explored the author's concepts, narrative thinking, and narrative strategies in Chinese and Western narrative thoughts. Through research, people can discover the laws of narrative behavior in different literature and deepen general understanding of novels. Focusing on "characters" can not only deepen the understanding of the differences between the two narrative methods in China and the West, but also compare these methods to better understand and compare the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western narrative methods, thereby better promoting the overall development of character theory. This article explored the narrative thinking of Chinese and Western classical literature and grasped literary characteristics, which would enhance the vitality of traditional Chinese narrative creation and play a positive role in promoting the development of human narrative thinking in a diversified theoretical context.