ABSTRACT
This brief history of early Chinese literature traces the rise of artful verbal expression in China to the rhythms and rhetoric of bronze inscriptions that appeared in the first centuries of the Zhou era. Shortly thereafter, a strong tradition of poetry developed and eventually took form as a highly influential collection of 305 pieces known as the Odes. Other types of literature, historical narrative and philosophical writing or master’s literature chief among them, also arose during the last centuries of the Zhou, and became a foundation for much later literary expression. When the Han dynasty consolidated the unification of China in the second century CE, new writings reflected and often justified that unification, Sima Qian’s monumental Records of the Historian chief among these. But the Han, too, witnessed a growth of literary self-consciousness, drawing to some extent on the earlier work of the poet Qu Yuan and flowering in such verbal expressions as the Han Fu or “rhapsody” and “The Nineteen Old Poems.” While the essay that follows can hardly capture the full range and power of early Chinese literature, it attempts to give one way, among many other possibilities, of organizing and thinking about that rich tradition.
