Literature: China Essay

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earlier known literary works. This Babylonian desperate poem arises from stories in the Sumerian language. Although the Sumerian stories are older (probably date to at least 2100 B.C.), it was probably composed around 1900 BC. The epic deals with themes of heroism, friendship, loss, and the by-line for eternal life. Different historical periods are reflected in writings. National and tribal sagas, accounts of the origin of the world and of customs, and myths which sometimes carry m viva or unearthly messages predominate in the preurban eras. The epics of Homer, dating from the archean to mid(prenominal)dle agitate age, and the broad Indian epics of a slightly later period, have more tell of deliberate literary authorship, surviving like the older myths through oral tradition for long periods before being written down. As a more urban culture developed, academies provided a means of transmission for defective and philosophical lit in early civilizations, resulting in the prevalence of literature in quaint China, Ancient India, Persia and Ancient Greece and Rome. Many works of originally periods, even in narrative form, had a covert moral or didactic purpose, such(prenominal) as the Sanskrit Panchatantra or the Metamorphoses of Ovid.Drama and satire besides developed as urban culture provided a larger universe audience, and later readership, for literary production. Lyric poetry (as opposed to epic poetry) was much the speciality of courtyards and aristocratic circles, particularly in East Asia where nervous strains were collected by the Chinese aristocracy as poems, the most notable being the Shijing or Book of Songs. Over a long period, the poetry of popular pre-literate balladry and song interpenetrated and eventually influenced poetry in the literary medium. In old-fashioned China, early literature was primarily focused on philosophy, historiography, military science, agriculture, and poetry. China, the or igin of young paper making and woodblock strikeing, produced one of the worlds first print cultures.1 Much of Chinese literature originates with the Hundred Schools of Thought period that occurred during the eastern Zhou Dynasty (769-269 BCE). The most important of these include the Classics of Confucianism, of Daoism, of Mohism, of Legalism, as well as works of military science (e.g. Sun Tzus The Art of War) and Chinese history (e.g. Sima Qians Records of the Grand Historian). Ancient Chinese literature had a heavy emphasis on historiography, with often very detailed court records. An exemplary piece of narrative history of ancient China wasthe Zuo Zhuan, which was compiled no later than 389 BCE, and attributed to the blind 5th coulomb BCE historian Zuo Qiuming. In ancient India, literature originated from stories that were originally orally transmitted.Early genres included manoeuvre, fables, sutras and epic poetry. Sanskrit literature begins with the Vedas, dating back to 150 01000 BCE, and continues with the Sanskrit Epics of Iron Age India. The Vedas are among the oldest unutterable texts. The Samhitas (vedic collections) date to roughly 15001000 BCE, and the circum-Vedic texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to c. 1000-500 BCE, resulting in a Vedic period, spanning the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE, or the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age.2 The period between approximately the 6th to 1st centuries BC proverb the composition and redaction of the two most important Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, with ensuant redaction progressing down to the 4th century AD. In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer, who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Hesiod, who wrote whole kit and boodle and Days and Theogony, are some of the earliest, and most influential, of Ancient Greek literature. guiltless Greek genres included philosophy, poetry, historiography, comedies and dramas. Plato and Aristotle authored philosophical texts that are the foundation of Western philosophy, Sappho and Pindar were influential lyrical poets, and Herodotus and Thucydides were early Greek historians. Although drama was popular in Ancient Greece, of the hundreds of tragedies written and performed during the classical age, only a limited number of plays by three authors still exist Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The plays of Aristophanes provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, the earliest form of Greek Comedy, and are in fact used to touch on the genre.3Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and author of the Faust books Roman histories and biographies anticipated the extensive gothic literature of lives of saints and miraculous chronicles, but the most characteristic form of the midst Ages was the romance, an adventurous and sometimes magical narrative with strong popular appeal. Controversial, religious, semipolitical and instructional literature proliferated during the Renaissan ce as a result of the subterfuge of printing, while the mediaeval romance developed into a more character-based and mental form of narrative, the novel, ofwhich early and important examples are the Chinese Monkey and the German Faust books. In the Age of Reason philosophical tracts and speculations on history and tender nature integrated literature with social and political developments.The inevitable reaction was the explosion of Romanticism in the later 18th century which repossess the imaginative and fantastical bias of old romances and folk-literature and asserted the primacy of individual hear and emotion. But as the 19th-century went on, European fiction evolved towards realism and naturalism, the meticulous reinforcement of real life and social trends. Much of the output of naturalism was implicitly polemical, and influenced social and political change, but 20th century fiction and drama moved back towards the subjective, emphasising unconscious motivations and social and environmental pressures on the individual. Writers such as Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Kafka and Pirandello exemplify the trend of documenting internal rather than external realities. genre fiction also showed it could question reality in its 20th century forms, in spite of its fixed formulas, through the enquiries of the skeptical detective and the utility(a) realities of science fiction. The separation of mainstream and genre forms (including journalism) continued to blur during the period up to our own times. William Burroughs, in his early works, and Hunter S. Thompson expanded documentary coverage into strong subjective statements after the second World War, and post-modern critics have disparaged the brain of objective realism in general.