Essay (China)

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Essay ( Chinese  散文 , Pinyin sǎnwén ) denotesunbound literature in Chinese literature in contrast to other literary genres such as poetry or song poetry. Chinese essays are prose works that come in different styles and forms. The earlier essays dealt first with historical, political and philosophical topics, later essays also dealt with theoretical and aesthetic topics.

Many forms of Chinese prose are considered an essay, e.g. B. Brush notes , biographical writings and reports of trips.

The forerunners of the essay were the classics of Confucianism and Daoism , which produced a multitude of literary stylistic devices concisely, precisely and expressively. These prose works showed a high level of intellectual development and were particularly relevant and recognized socially.

This classical style (fugu) was considered exemplary in later dynasties and attempts were made to revive it, especially during the Tang and Song dynasties , e.g. B. by Han Yu .

Autonomy and independence as a literary genre were then presented with new forms of essays, such as B. Liu Zongyuan's landscape sketches and parables . While poetry was still seen as authoritative at court, the essay established itself at a distance from the imperial court.

Outstanding prose writers during the Song period were Su Shi and Ouyang Xiu .

During the Ming Dynasty , a small form of prose, xiaopin or xiaopinwen , arose , which showed a pronounced individuality and often referred to everyday observations. Well-known authors here are Zhang Dai and Yuan Hongda .

Essays were also written by participants in the state examinations, where the eight-part essay (bagu wen) was written, which had a particularly rigid scheme, which is said to be the cause of the impoverishment of the essayistic style after the Ming period. Since these essays were written in Wenyan (written language), they only served an elite class, who viewed the essay as self-affirmation and the classic spelling as an end in itself. The Chinese drama and the Chinese novel were therefore of increasing importance at this time .

After the spoken colloquial language ( Baihua ) was also written in China , the essay gained importance again in modern literature. Current events in politics and society were reflected on here quickly and spontaneously. A special form of modern prose is the Zawen , the critical essay that contains discussions or descriptions and can have different forms such as B. flaming appeals, factual treatises or subjectively shaped representations. A modern author who renewed the essay in terms of content and form was Lu Xun , whose prose writings often contain polemical attacks on the political opponent, but the traditional reflection was retained. Zhou Zuoren and Qian Zhongshu, on the other hand, referred in their essays on scholarship to the literary tradition that was abundant in China. Their importance, however, is steadily declining due to the disappearance of a generally recognized classical education and literature.

During the era of Mao Zedong , essay writing was subject to very strong political constraints due to the partiality he called for in 1942. It was not until the reform policy and liberalization from the end of the 1970s that essay writing revived in artistic and thematic terms. B. by authors like Wang Meng and Zhang Jie .

Today there is a popular essay that is politically and socially shaped. Individual, specific forms have emerged such as features , brief newspaper reviews, sketches and sketchy transcripts of thoughts and treatises.

See also

literature

  • Volker Klöpsch, Eva Müller (Ed.): Lexicon of Chinese Literature. CH Beck, Munich 2004.