Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical.

• Author: Egan, Ronald
• Position: Reviews of Books

Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical. By ANDRE LEVY, translated by WILLIAM H. NIENHAUSER, JR. Bloomington: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000. Pp. xi + 168. $22.95.

Andre Levy's concise and elegant account of pine-modern Chinese literature (La litterature chinoise ancienne at classique) was published in 1991. Now, William H. Nienhauser, Jr. has given us an admirably readable English translation of Levy's work. It is a volume that will be useful to students and others who want a brief overview of the subject--one that introduces the genres, themes, and writers and that provides through some 120 translations from the Chinese a taste of the flavors of major works. Levy did not set out to write a history of Chinese literature. His goal, as he explains in his introduction, "would be rather to complement this list [of such histories] by presenting the reader with a different approach, one more concrete, less dependent on the dynastic chronology. Rather than a history, it is a picture--inevitably incomplete--of Chinese literature of the past that this little book offers" (p. 1). In the translator's preface (p. ix), this same avoidance of the dynastic approach to organizing the subject is singled out as the feature that gives the volume its special appeal and effectiveness.

This "picture" has four components, which constitute the book's four chapters: "Antiquity," "Prose," "Poetry," and "Literature of Entertainment: The Novel and Theatre." These are not lengthy chapters--that is the whole point. The longest of them is forty-one pages, the shortest is nineteen. Inside these pithy units, Levy's focus is this: the first chapter concentrates on the early philosophical works (Mo Zi and the Logicians, Legalist writings, Dao de jing and Zhuang Zi, and the Confucian Classics). The second, "Prose," opens with a section on narrative, especially as found in historical works (e.g., Shi ji). This is followed by an account of expository prose as found in the "eight masters" of the Tang and Song dynasties. The chapter moves on then to the "trivial literature" (i.e., xiaopin wen) of the Ming and Qing dynasties. "Poetry" opens with some discussion of "The Songs of Chu" and anonymous Han dynasty yuefu. But the bulk of the chapter is given to what Levy calls the "golden age" of poetry, from the We i-Jin era through the Tang and Song dynasties. The discussion concentrates on a handful of major poets, with a few pages devoted to each. The final chapter, "Literature of...