The Rise of Literary and Aesthetic
Criticism in Asian History 250-600 CE
In this part of my World History
blog I am moving away from early modern history to highlight more examples of
how the Rise of the West and Western Civilization are given too much credit for
the invention of culture, philosophy, science and so on. Now it is certainly
true that Roman literature and history became intertextual by the Augustinian
period of the late 1st c. BCE to early 1st c. CE. This means that history writing and
literature were intertwined, written histories took on rhetorical styles just as
Ovid’s epic The Aenid, commissioned by the emperor Augustus, referenced
Roman historical myths and legends (Conte 1999) . Comparisons of early classical Chinese and
Greek literature is also worth considering as introduced in this video lecture by Professor Robert Oxnam and Stephen Owen on the Book of Songs.
Chinese Classical Literature
and the Social Position of Criticism
Chinese literature provides a number
of the earliest works of literary criticism.
A principal example is Liu Xie (Hsieh) The Literary Mind and the
Carving of Dragons, written in the early 6th century CE (Hsieh 2015) . Liu Hsieh (465-522 CE) was a Chinese monk and
literary critic who wrote from the Ting-lin Monastery in Southern China during
the Liang Dynasty (Hsieh, XXXV) . Liu’s preference for classical forms arose
from his intensive scholarship of an earlier body of literary criticism
produced in the 3rd century Han Dynasty as well as the
chronicles of Sima Qian (145-80 BCE) (Department of Asian Art 2000) .
Liu Xie (Hsieh) compiled his works
on literary criticism during a prosperous period for the Southern
Chinese Liang Dynasty.
Some of his writing appeared for the court of the Emperor Wudi (r. 502–49), who was a
scholar and Buddhist and sent an emissary monk Song Yuan to India to collect
texts on the origins of Buddhism (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2001) . More recent studies
on Lieu Xie offer appreciations of the depths of literary technique and
analysis (Cai 2010) .
Indian Literature and
Historical Epics
Among the most developed in length
of narrative and in chronological literature are the literary epics from the
Indian subcontinent. Sheldon Pollock’s
study of the origins and development of Sanskrit literature as both an
administrative language and as an ideology is a pioneering work (Pollock 2006) . The rise of the
Veda and Vedic literature dates to the end of the BCE period and among its
successors, is the Mahābharāta historical epic of conquest and battle and the
later Rāmāyana literature and other texts based on the Sanskrit language and
writing system introduced by the landowning elite and their court society who
dominated power (Pollock, 78) .
Several studies note that before the
codification of laws, the warrior class or caste developed their sense of
ideology and ethics from stories and epics (McGrath 2004) .
Early and Middle Persian
Literature and History
A third source of early literary
criticism is found in Western Asia and particularly in Iranian literature where
a pre-Islamic secular literature arose in the late Sassanid period that
flourished in the interim period of the breakup of the Roman Empire into a
Greek dominated Byzantine dynasty and its Western based Latin dynasty and
empire. In around the year 600 CE we
find the Kārnāmak-I Artakshēr-I Pāpakān (Book of the Deeds of Aradashir, son of
Pāpak (Klíma 1968, 44) . The history informs us of the origins of the
Sassanians, for it begins with the story of the son of a common shepherd Sāsān
who rises from the ranks of a common soldier to become the future Sassanian
king and founder of the Sassanid Dynasty. This early literature is symptomatic
of a landlord and pastoral based court society that demands epics of loyalty
and a privileged monopoly of knowledge held by the court.
The monopoly of the court begins to
change with the rise of the merchant trade tales that surround the court but
which through their hero’s adventure encounters a wider swath of society and
geography. In this genre a number of
interesting literary forms of lasting value were either derived from India and
passed through Iranian storytelling and eventually into the Arabic A
Thousand and One Nights and the tales of Sheherezade. The origin may have come from stories known
as Hazār Afsāna (a thousand tales) that tell the story of a vizier and his
servant girl (Klíma, 54) . A number of other
old Persian/Iranian/Sassanid literary works survive only through their
translation and adaption into later Arabic literature and chronicles, including
the 10th century Iranian poet Firdausi, who came from the dehqan
class of Iranian landowners that likely descended from the same class that
dominated the Sassanid dynasty.
Firdausi’s classic text the Shāh-nāma thus collects oral
histories that date back to the landowning class’ tales and sagas from the
Sassanid Dynasty and attempts to provide a dynastic interpretation that was
deemed relevant to a 10th century Samanid Muslim dynasty (Dabashi 2012) . Other texts from Central Asia attest to the
fusion of Buddhist and Christian Manichean traditions and texts, that include
fragmentary epics of the Bodhisatva legend (Klíma 1968) .
Bibliography
Cai, Zong-Qi. 2010. "Evolving
Practices of Guan and Liu Xie's Theory of Literary Interpretation." In Interpretation
and Literature in Early Medieval China, by Yuet-Keung Lo and Alan K. L.
Chan, edited by edited by Yuet-Keung Lo, and Alan K. L. Chan, State
University of New York Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,, 103-132. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hct-ebooks/de.
Conte, Gian Biaggio. 1999. Latin Literature:
A History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dabashi, Hamid. 2012. The World of Persian
Literary Humanism. Harvard University Press. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Department of Asian Art. 2000. Han Dynasty
(206 B.C.–220 A.D.)”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. Accessed
November 26, 2016. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hand/hd_hand.htm (October
2000).
Hsieh, Liu. 2015. The Literary Mind and the
Carving of Dragons. Translated by Vincent Yu-Chung Shih. New York: New
York Review of Books.
Klíma, Otakar. 1968. "Avesta, Ancient
Persian and Middle Persian." In History of Iranian Literature, by
Jan Rypka, 34-65. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
McGrath, Kevin. 2004. Sanskrit Hero: Karna in
Epic Mahabharata. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2001. China,
500–1000 A.D. October. Accessed November 26, 2016.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/?period=06®ion=eac.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the
Gods in the World of Men. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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