research topics chinese literature

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Home > HFA > LLC > ASIANLAN > CHINESE_THESES

Chinese Masters Theses Collection

Theses from 2023 2023.

Insights into Chinese Second Language Acquisition: The Relationship between Glossing and Vocabulary Recall in Reading , Steven S. DeVellis, Chinese

Acquisition of Chinese Measure Words by Chinese as Second Language Learners: A Corpus-based Study of Lexical, Semantic, and Syntactic Characteristics , Yutong Feng, Chinese

Between Verb and Preposition: Diachronic Stages of Coverbs in Mandarin Chinese , Glynis Jones, Chinese

The Near-Synonymous Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese: Etymology, Modern Usage, And Possible Problems in L2 Classroom , Irina Kavokina, Chinese

Voices Against an Era: Alternative Voices, Cultural Heroics, and the Impact of He Yong and Zhang Chu on Chinese Rock Music , Peter J. Moncur, Chinese

Theses from 2022 2022

Second Language Competence and Translation Ability: An Investigation of English-native Speakers Learning Chinese as a Second Language , Chensimeng Pan, Chinese

The Different Waves of "Chineseness": Analysis of Culture References and Lyrics in Zhongguofeng Music , Austin S. Ye, Chinese

An Investigation into American University Students’ Motivation for Chinese Learning: A Case Study , Qingqing Zhang, Chinese

Theses from 2021 2021

The Acquisition of Advanced Level Chinese Heritage Language (CHL) Learners：A Comparative Analysis Concerning The Aspect Marker “LE了” , Jingjing Ao, Chinese

Self-representation in Selected Poems of Gu Taiqing (1799-1877) , Li-Ting Chang, Chinese

On Shattered Ruins: The Cultural Practices and Production of the Great Tanghsna Earthquake in Post-Mao Literature and Film , Jinhui Chen, Chinese

TBLT in Virtual L2 Classroom: Challenges, Actions and Insights , Jianan He, Chinese

Women in a Fallen City: The Rape of Nanking and The Flowers of War , Tianle Wang, Chinese

Theses from 2020 2020

LITERARY PORTRAYALS OF RELIGIOUS AWAKENING THROUGH SUFFERING AND LOSS - BUDDHIST, DAOIST, AND CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES , Robert Canning, Chinese

INVESTIGATION OF THE CONSONANT ENDINGS OF THE CHAOSHAN DIALECT: A RESULT OF LANGUAGE CONTACT AND HORIZONTAL TRANSMISSION , Jin Chen, Chinese

A Textbook-Based Study on Cultural Knowledge Acquisition in Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language , Feng Gao, Chinese

Urbanlization and Internet Literature: Zhang Jiajia and His Healing Story , Shayue Qi, Chinese

Perfective Marker Dao in the Nanjiang Dialect , Kun Yue, Chinese

The Sutras as Poetry: Wang Wei's Use of Buddhist Philosophy as Poetic Image , Yan Zhang, Chinese

Theses from 2019 2019

READING AND TRANSLATING “NOW-NESS” AND “CONTINUITY” IN THE IMAGISTIC LANGUAGE OF TANG POEMS , Mei Du, Chinese

Translation Issues in Modern Chinese Literature: Viewpoint, Fate and Metaphor in Xia Shang's "The Finger-Guessing Game" , Jonathan Heinrichs, Chinese

The Morality Of Chinese Legalism: Han Fei’s Advanced Philosophy , Yuan Ke, Chinese

A Study on English-speaking Learners' Acquisition of Three Chinese Modal Auxiliary Verbs: NENG, HUI ,And KEYI , Anqi Li, Chinese

NEW WINE IN AN OLD BOTTLE: PROPAGANDA AND ADAPTATION OF THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL IN POST-SOCIALIST CHINA , Ha Yeon Shin, Chinese

A Triad of Dilemmas in Sylvia Chang’s Films: Women in Love, Family and Society , Fanzhe Yang, Chinese

Reconsidering Diasporic Literature: "Homeland" and "Otherness" in The Lost Daughter of Happiness , Qijun Zhou, Chinese

Theses from 2018 2018

Probing into the Historical and Geographical Variants of Mandarin: A Computational Approach , Annie Chen, Chinese

Psychological with a Xuanyi Afterthought: A Translation of Cai Jun's "Kidnapped" and a Critical Introduction to His Popular Suspense Fiction , Katherine G. Holtrop, Chinese

A Study of the Intertexts in The Stone Of Goddess Nüwa (Nüwa Shi 女娲石) , Zhimo Li, Chinese

Studies on L2 Acquisition of Chinese Verbs of 'Change' by English Speakers , Baoqing Qian, Chinese

Decentralization in Wei Te-sheng's Film , Ji Wang, Chinese

ROLE-PLAY IN THE CHINESE CLASSROOM , Matthew Werth, Chinese

QUEST FOR PURE LOVE AND EQUAL RELATIONSHIP: THE GENESIS AND MEANING OF CHINESE DANMEI NOVEL , Mengwu Yun, Chinese

Theses from 2017 2017

Second Language Acquisition of Chinese Verb-Noun Collocations , Ying Cai, Chinese

Storytelling in the Age of Post-socialism: Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Third Front Trilogy” , Xuesong Shao, Chinese

A Linguistic Study on the Four Editions of Bǎijiā xìng 百家姓 in hP’ags-pa Script , Sicheng Wang, Chinese

Theses from 2016 2016

The Phonological System of A Xin'an Idiolect , Shuiying Lu, Chinese

THE HARMONIOUS CONCLUSIONS OF PEONY PAVILION & THE LUTE , Alexander McCartin, Chinese

Buddhist Depiction of Life in the Verse of the Tang Dynasty Poet Han Shan , Sijia Niu, Chinese

A Study On the Mutual Replacements of Three des in Chinese Blogs , Hui Sha, Chinese

A Textbook-Based Study on Measure Word Acquisition in Learners of Chinese as A Second Langauge , Shaofang Wang, Chinese

Genuineness and Love: A Study of Feng Menglong's Collection of Mountain Songs (Shan'ge 山歌) , Yujia Ye, Chinese

Youth Narrative in Feng Tang's The Beijing Trilogy , Mingjia Zhang, Chinese

Theses from 2015 2015

Building a Democratic Consciousness in Taiwan: An Analysis of Lung Ying-tai’s Political Essays Over Three Decades (1984–2003) , Conrad W. Bauer, Chinese

Analyzing Two Key Points of the Huaihai Campaign Using Sun Tzu's Net Assessment , Jimmy Chien, Chinese

Dwelling in the Vision of Utopia: A Politico-Religious Reading of Tao Qian , Jiani Lian, Chinese

THE LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF CHINESE EMOTICON , Xiangxi Liu, Chinese

The Effectiveness of Explicit Instruction Versus Implicit Instruction Method on Chinese Grammar Acquisition , Fuyang Peng, Chinese

Theses from 2014 2014

An Investigation of Native and Non-Native Chinese Language Teachers and Their Pedagogical Advantages , Thomas Burns, Chinese

Acoustic Analysis of the Tones in the Shantou Dialect , Danni Li, Chinese

A Study on the Acquisition of Chinese Directional Complements , lin lin, Chinese

Inferring Word-Meaning, Morpheme-Based, and Word-Based Second Language Vocabulary Teaching Methodologies , Qingli Liu, Chinese

An Investigation of Chinese Learners' Acquisition and Understanding of Bushou and Their Attitude on Formal In-Class Bushou Instruction , Yan P. Liu, Chinese

THE PHONOLOGICAL CHARACTERITICS AND THE HISTORICAL STRATA OF THE QIANJIANG DIALECT , Liyan Luo, Chinese

Theses from 2013 2013

The Reflexes of Middle Chinese Zhi and Zhao Initials in Modern Mandarin and Wu Dialect , Yu-jung Liang, Chinese

Study on Shan Gui: From Religious Text to Visual Representations , Le Lu, Chinese

The History of the Introduction of Chinese Language and Culture into the American Higher Education System , Chelsea H. Nakabayashi, Chinese

The Foundations of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language: An Investigation of Late 19th Century Textbooks , Lena Pearson, Chinese

The plural forms of personal pronouns in Modern Chinese , Baoying Qiu, Chinese

A Translation of Qiu Miaojin's "The Crocodile Diaries" , Alexandra Valencik, Chinese

The Use of Multimedia Material in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and Pedagogical Implications , Zhongyuan Williams, Chinese

Dialects into Films----The Element of “Dialect” in Chinese Films , Shun Yao, Chinese

The Comparison Of Meaning-inferred, Meaning-given, And Sentence Translation Methods For Chinese Vocabulary Teaching , Yani Zeng, Chinese

A Comparative Study of the Effectiveness of Input-based Activities And Output-based Activities on the Acquisition of Chinese Language , Xiaolei Zhang, Chinese

Theses from 2012 2012

A Diachronic and Synchronic Examination of the Disposal Construction in Min and Mandarin Chinese , Chunching Chang, Chinese

The Artist as Creator: The Theory of Art in Du Fu's Poems about Paintings , James H. Edwards, Chinese

Danmei Literature as Indicator of Social Change: A Sociocultural Analysis of Xiao Chun’s Collide , Patrick l. Hamilton, Chinese

Xunzian Political Philosophy: Pioneering Pragmatism , Brandon King, Chinese

Motivation of Chinese Language Learners: A Case Study in a Intermediate Chinese Class , Hong Yan, Chinese

The Phonological Features of Sino-Khitan and Its Relations to the Origin of Northern Mandarin , Man Zhang, Chinese

Theses from 2011 2011

The Phonological Features and the Historical Strata of the Heyang Dialect , Xiaoying Li, Chinese

The Effects of Recasts and Explicit Feedback on Chinese Language Acquisition in the Task-based Classroom , Lei Yang, Chinese

Theses from 2010 2010

Teaching Character Formation Rationales with a Computer-Assisted Courseware , Bo Feng, Chinese

Expressions of Self in a Homeless World: Zhang Dai (1597-1680?) and His Writings in the Ming-Qing Transition Period , Wenjie Liu, Chinese

Readings Of Chinese Poet Xue Tao , Lu Yu, Chinese

Theses from 2009 2009

A Record of the Defense of Xiangyang's City Wall, 1206-1207 , Julie J. Avery, Chinese

The Pursuit and Dispelling of Holy Heterosexual Love: from "Love Must Not Be Forgotten" to Wu Zi , Li Li, Chinese

Bai Juyi's poems about women/ , Xiaohua Liu, Chinese

Formation Of The Xikun Style Poetry , Jin Qian, Chinese

The Cfl Students’ Perspective of the Chinese Ambiguous Sentences , Ting Juan Song, Chinese

Theses from 2008 2008

Integrating multimedia into Chinese character teaching and learning for Cfl beginners/ , Weijia Li, Chinese

The Moral and Racial Socialization of Children: The Image of Wu Feng in Taiwan School Readers , Claire R. Maccabee, Chinese

A study of the standardization of Chinese writing/ , Ying Wang, Chinese

Theses from 2007 2007

Reinventing the wheel or creating a tale's genealogy? :: a comparison of twelve versions of the tale of Mulan/ , Julie Anne Lohr, Chinese

The variegated blossoms :: studies on the children characters in the literary productions of Chi Zijian/ , Xuebo Sun, Chinese

Theses from 2006 2006

A comparison of the Guodian and Mawangdui Laozi texts/ , Dan Murphy, Chinese

Theses from 2005 2005

The images of Jiangnan in Zhao Mengfu's (1254-1322) poetry/ , Li E, Chinese

Uniting the ancestors :: Cheng Minzheng (1445-1499) and the creation of the Comprehensive Genealogy of the Xin'an Cheng (Xin'an Chengshi Tongzong Shipu)/ , Neil E. Mcgee, Chinese

Theses from 2004 2004

An annotated translation of "Accounts of supernatural retribution"/ , Elliot Meier Billings, Chinese

Theses from 2003 2003

Toponyms of the Nanzhao periphery/ , John C. Lloyd, Chinese

Theses from 2002 2002

Chinese color word evolution/ , Mary E. Franck, Chinese

We undergo, we experience and we write :: an analysis of contemporary Chinese women writers and their writings/ , Yujie Ge, Chinese

Theses from 2000 2000

Role models in the contemporary Chinese essay :: Ba Jin and the post-cultural revolution memorial essays in Suixiang lu/ , Larissa Castriotta, Chinese

The 1977-1978 archaeological excavations of the Lu cemeteries at Qufu, Shandong/ , James Patrick Draine, Chinese

Purity, modernity, and pessimism :: translation of Mu Shiying's fiction/ , Rui Tao, Chinese

Theses from 1999 1999

Li Zhi (1527-1602) and his literary thought/ , Qingliang Chen, Chinese

Theses from 1998 1998

Opening the Lancang (Mekong) River in Yunnan :: problems and prospects for Xishuangbanna/ , Merrick Lex Berman, Chinese

The single-child policy and its impact on Chinese kinship terms among kindergarten children in Shanghai/ , Xiaoxue Dai, Chinese

Theses from 1996 1996

Translation of Yuan Qiongqiong's Fever, with introduction/ , Julie Felice Marcus, Chinese

Theses from 1993 1993

New features of Confucianism as seen in Lu Jia's Xinyu/ , Shaodan Luo, Chinese

Advanced Search

Notify me via email or RSS
Collections
Disciplines

Author Corner

Login for Faculty Authors
Faculty Author Gallery
Expert Gallery
University Libraries
Asian Languages and Literatures Website
UMass Amherst

This page is sponsored by the University Libraries.

Privacy Copyright

About the Journal

The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture publishes research articles and essays on premodern Chinese literature and all aspects of the broader literary culture. It also publishes work that explores the influence of traditional literature and culture in modern and contemporary China. For some periods of the twentieth century, the study of premodern Chinese literature was considered by some an impediment to the rise of science and democracy, but it is now recognized in China as a valuable heritage that can enrich Chinese culture for the twenty-first century. Jointly sponsored by Peking University and the University of Illinois, the journal is committed to an international editorial vision and to in-depth exchange and collaboration among scholars in China, the United States, and other parts of the world. The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture is indexed in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI).

The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Distinguished Editor Award was presented to Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture coeditor Zong-qi Cai in 2020.

Xingpei Yuan, Zong-qi Cai

Issue Alerts

Publish in this journal

For information on how to submit an article, visit our submission guidelines .

View subscription rates and details for Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture .

CELJ Distinguished Editor Award

Congratulations to Zong-qi Cai, recipient of the 2020 Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals!

Affiliations

About Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
Editorial Board
For Authors
Rights and Permissions Inquiry
Online ISSN 2329-0056
Print ISSN 2329-0048
Copyright © 2024
Duke University Press
905 W. Main St. Ste. 18-B
Durham, NC 27701
(888) 651-0122
International
+1 (919) 688-5134
Information For
Advertisers
Book Authors
Booksellers/Media
Journal Authors/Editors
Journal Subscribers
Prospective Journals
Licensing and Subsidiary Rights
View Open Positions
email Join our Mailing List
catalog Current Catalog
Accessibility
Get Adobe Reader

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Ohio State nav bar

The Ohio State University

BuckeyeLink
Find People
Search Ohio State

A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature review

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of John A. Crespi’s review of A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature , by Fan Boqun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/crespi3/ . My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, editor

A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature

By Fan Boqun Translated by Dong Xiang and Jihui Wang

Reviewed by John A. Crespi MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July 2021)

Fan Boqun. A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature . Trs. Dong Xiang and Jihui Wang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xxv+804 pp. ISBN: 978-1-107-06856-8.

Fan Boqun’s 范伯群 History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature is a comprehensive and sometimes quirky contribution to the study of a vast corpus of writing that has been overshadowed by literature associated with the May Fourth tradition. Originally published in 2006 as Zhongguo xiandai tongsu wenxue shi (中国现代通俗文学史), and now translated into English thanks to the dedicated efforts of Dong Xiang and Jihui Wang, the book stands as Fan’s magnum opus , the product of a lifetime of research on mass-market fiction, most of it originally published by installment in the tabloids, newspapers, and magazines of China’s major cities, especially Shanghai, from the 1890s through the 1940s. Fan’s term for this category of writing, “popular literature” (通俗文学), he devised to distinguish it from the ideological mainstream of “elite literature” (精英文学) that grew out of the New Literature movement in the late 1910s. The primary goal of Fan’s book is to integrate popular literature into the “family” of modern Chinese literature. As Susan Daruvala describes it in her helpful and concise introduction, Fan seeks to “transcend the structural dominance” of a literary history that gives prominence to elite literature by constructing “a new system of literary history based on ‘pluralistic symbiosis’ (多元共生) which would pay attention to the literary tastes and experiences of the entire population” (xxiv). Put another way, Fan aims to expand the canon of Chinese modern literature to recognize a vast and varied readership for works whose main purpose was to entertain rather than educate and enlighten. In so doing, Fan opens the door to a motley assortment of “pulp” genres—brothel novels, novels of exposure, historical romances, martial arts novels, detective fiction, and so on—whose long-term marginalization in mainland China’s orthodox literary historiography belies their huge popularity across more than half a century in China’s mainland.

Fan opens the door only so wide, however. To be sure, the breadth of material he covers is truly impressive. Nowhere else will you find between the covers of one book such a wealth of information on popular authors, popular periodicals, and, most of all, detailed plot summaries of what were essentially best-selling novels of the late-Qing and Republican periods. Reading Fan’s History from cover to cover, all 800 pages of it, will give you an excellent overview of the kinds of imaginative works literate people in China were actually consuming on a daily basis from the 1890s through the 1940s. That said, Fan does not conceal the fact that he selects and interprets his materials based on a May Fourth vision of literature. The texts he includes, and the parts of those texts that he chooses to emphasize, tend to be concerned with questions of nation, modernity, and social issues. Overall, his project is constructive, not deconstructive. Canonization and national literature are not problematic ideas for Fan, nor does he question basic concepts like “history,” “modern,” “Chinese,” or “popular vs. elite.” His narrative reaches 1949 and stops, with but the slightest mention of popular literature’s development in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Gender-based analysis is prominent for its total absence.

Before going on, it is necessary to recognize that because Fan wrote his History in Chinese for a local audience and using all Chinese-language sources, critiquing the book based on Euro-American studies of modern Chinese popular literature is beside the point. History inhabits an academic world with its own set of practices and concerns, many of which would likely raise eyebrows in other circles. We discover as much in the book’s Introduction, which sets up a teleology of literary development that, in the end, harmonizes foreign and local modernities. Fan’s survey, strictly chronological, offers “a rough line of development of popular literature in China” that is “based on its innate rule of development” (3). This “innate rule” rests on a dichotomy between the different origins of elite and popular literature, with the former emerging “as a result of the enormous influence of the new trend of literary thought from foreign countries,” and the latter coming from “the innate impetus of our national literary tradition” (3). In Fan’s view, elite (foreign-influenced) and popular (native Chinese) literature both contain modernizing impulses. Remarkable, according to Fan, is that the “founding work of Chinese popular literature,” Han Bangqing’s 韓邦慶 1890s serialized brothel novel Legends of Shanghai Flowers (海上花列傳), was a local, spontaneous, but “inevitable” response to modern industry, commerce, and urbanization more than twenty years before the foreign-derived New Literature movement had begun. [1] What this shows, Fan says, is that “[w]ithout the driving force of foreign literatures, Chinese popular writers would begin their journey on the road to modernization with their works all the same” (3). Fifty years and over 700 pages later, Fan concludes his chronology by emphasizing how 1940s writers of popular literature, in particular Zhang Ailing 張愛玲, had successfully blended the traditional influences governing popular literature with the foreign influences distinguishing elite literature, demonstrating that there is “no unbridgeable gap” between the two “systems.” Fan then adds—perhaps tongue in cheek; it is hard to tell—that Zhang Ailing and two other popular writers of the 1940s, Xu Xu 徐訏 and Bu Naifu 卜乃夫 (a.k.a. Wumingshi 無名氏), “implement the ‘one country, two systems’ policy in the literary field” (740).

Whatever one chooses to make of Fan’s overall narrative scheme, between Han Bangqing and Zhang Ailing, History traverses a prodigious quantity of fictional and semi-fictional writing. He lays the foundation for the book in the first two chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on several early works representing the “buds” of popular fiction in the 1890s: Legends of Shanghai Flowers , Sun Yusheng’s 孫玉聲 (Sun Jiazhen 孙家振) Dream of a Bustling Shanghai (海上繁華夢), Zhang Chunfan’s 张春帆 Nine-tailed Tortoise (九尾龜), and Tianxu Wosheng’s 天虛我生 Fate of Tears (淚珠緣). Chapter 2 examines the primary medium for early popular literature, tabloids (小報), by addressing the editorial and entrepreneurial work of Li Boyuan 李伯元 and his Leisure Time (遊戲報). Already in these two chapters we find Fan working to graft popular literature and publications onto the tree of mainstream intellectual literature. For instance, with Nine-tailed Tortoise Fan must work around critiques by May Fourth giants Lu Xun 魯迅 and Hu Shi 胡適, who saw the novel as little more than a guide to prostitution. Fan rehabilitates the novel and its author by reconceiving the former as a didactic work exposing the deceptions of brothel girls, and the latter by pointing to Zhang Chunfan’s later writing, in particular his The Sea of Politicians (宦海, 1923-1924), which in Fan’s view proves Zhang to be “a man of chivalry and justice” for its courageous exposure of scheming warlords and unscrupulous politicians. As for Li Boyuan’s Leisure Time , Fan struggles to reconcile what he perceives as a moral inconsistency in the tabloid’s editorial stance. Namely, he wonders how Li could on one hand write an editorial portraying the patronage of brothels and sing-song girls as deadly distraction from the decline of the nation, and then in the same issue announce a column providing daily updates on the names and workplaces of “the Beauties of Shanghai.” Fan’s assessment of this inconsistency demonstrates the kinds of challenges he faces when reconciling the crowd-pleasing nature of popular publications with the orthodox national narrative that he espouses. It also offers a good sense of how Fan’s distinct and often moralizing authorial voice is rendered into English throughout the book:

His [Li Boyuan’s] wishes were self-contradictory, for if those infatuated daydreamers were awakened and realized that when they were immersed in sensual pleasures they were actually among those wailing in grief while tasting sweet poison on the hotbed of future troubles which would eventually lead to their own downfall, would they willfully keep visiting brothels anymore? The continuation of those overwhelming relationships should perhaps be shifted to discontinuation (77).

From here, Fan moves on to cover the first three decades of the century in the next thirteen chapters, which describe three “waves” of periodicals, each characterized by certain dominant genres of popular fiction. The first wave, from 1902 to 1907, begins with Liang Qichao’s attempts at political novels before moving on to “novels of condemnation,” such as Wu Jianren’s 吳趼人 Strange Events of the Past Twenty Years (二十年目睹之怪現狀), Liu E’s 劉鶚 Travels of Lao Can (老殘遊記), and Zeng Pu’s 曾樸 Flower in the Sea of Sin (孽海花), but also lesser-known works like Ji Wen’s 姬文 Voices of Businessmen (市聲), a novel unique in its time for its depiction of Chinese engineers and industrialists. A second part of the “first wave” starts in 1906, where Fan detects a trend in “novels of sentiment” and “novels of grievance,” the former represented by Wu Jianren’s Sea of Regret (孽海恨) and the latter by Fu Lin’s 符霖 A Drowned Bird’s Pebbles (禽海石). The second wave, lasting from 1909 to 1917, ranges through serial fiction from a number of important popular publications of the time, including Grand Magazine (小說大觀), edited by Bao Tianxiao 包天笑, Fiction Monthly (小說月報), the magazine later annexed by the “elite” Literary Research Association, and Saturday (禮拜六), where Fan focuses mainly on contributions by Zhou Shoujuan 周瘦娟. Fan discusses several types of popular writing characteristic of the “second wave.” The first is “legendary sketches,” which refers to unofficial and sometimes totally concocted accounts of historical events, such as the Boxer Uprising and Taiping Rebellion, and of notorious personages, most notably the Empress Dowager 慈禧太后, Yuan Shikai 袁世凱, and Yuan’s playboy son Yuan Kewen 袁克文. Another genre is “problem stories,” a narrative genre posing readers with moral dilemmas, inspired by Frank Stockton’s famous 1882 story “The Lady, or the Tiger?” The third is “Shanghai inside stories,” which Fan goes to great lengths to compare with American turn-of-the-century muckraking journalism. The comparison fails, Fan admits, because, aside from some laudable works by better-known writers such as Wu Jianren’s Exposure of the Official World (官場現形記), China’s “inside stories” devolved into sensationalized narratives of crime and sex, which Fan colorfully describes as a “scumbag exhibition” of “vagrants, freeloaders, peddlers and gangsters” carried out by unscrupulous publishers “deep in an abyss of cheesiness” (328).

Fan prefaces his discussion of popular publications’ “third wave,” beginning in 1921, with passing mention of the reorganization of Fiction Monthly by Mao Dun 茅盾 and Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸, followed by a lengthy description of two literary societies for popular writers, the Stars Club (星社) and the Green Club (青社). Here Fan remarks on how popular writers of these two groups more or less ignored the diatribes launched at them by the advocates of New Literature. Although Fan doesn’t say as much, with the periodical market booming in the 1920s and the audience for popular literature expanding, popular writers’ relative silence in the literary fray was probably due to a general lack of concern over competition from New Literature, which occupied but a tiny niche of the market.

Chapters 10 through 15 survey several key genres of popular literature in the 1920s, brothel novels, martial arts novels, social novels, and detective fiction, with detours into the early development of China’s film industry, including the adaptation of popular literature to film, the growth of the pictorial press, with particular focus on Bi Yihong’s 毕倚虹 Pictorial Shanghai (上海畫報), and an emergent feature of the period’s writing that Fan calls “urban local color.” Urban local color refers to popular writers’ ability to offer fine-grained representations of urban lifeways in Shanghai or Beijing, which Fan contrasts with elite writers’ attempts to “invent novels out of hometown memories” (524). Chapters 16 and 17 shift away from Shanghai and toward the work of popular fiction of the north, namely Beijing and Tianjin. The main Beijing-based writer is, as one would expect, Zhang Henshui 張恨水, whom Fan regards as a breakthrough writer not only for his ability to straddle the elite and popular, but also for the impact of Zhang’s Fate (啼笑姻緣), which was adapted for spoken drama, film, local operas, and picture books. Aside from Liu Yunruo 劉雲若, the “Zhang Henshui of Tianjin,” the other northern writers Fan discusses wrote martial arts fiction. Here Fan gives special praise to Li Shoumin 李壽民, pen-name Huanzhulouzhu 還珠樓主, as “the leader of the second wave of martial arts novels who brought martial arts writers to a higher level of art” (605). Chapter 17 provides portraits of four martial arts writers—Gong Baiyu 宮白羽, Wang Dulu 王度廬, Zheng Zhengyin 鄭證因, and Zhu Zhenmu 朱貞木—along with plot summaries and some critical commentary of their main works, including Wang’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍) and Zheng’s The Tablet of Seven Killings (七殺碑).

In chapter 18, “Social Fiction Writers of Various Levels from the 1930s to the 1940s in Shanghai,” Fan’s discussion of four authors makes clear the hierarchy he applies to popular fiction. At the top is Qin Shou’ou’s 秦瘦歐 The Fall of Begonia (秋海棠) serialized in 1941, which Fan praises for its exposé of warlords and for how it deploys the metaphor of the begonia leaf, a coded reference to the shape of the map of China, which was at the time being “eaten” by the invading “caterpillar” Japan. The two authors in the middle are Wang Xiaoyi 王小逸 and Zhou Tianlai 周天籟. Wang, a writer reportedly able to produce ten serial novels simultaneously without mixing up the plots, earns praise for his Garnet (石榴紅), which at its end depicts the heroine, a Shanghai social butterfly, entrapping and killing a despotic landlord. Wang, however, loses points for producing other (unmentioned) novels that were simply pornographic. Fan commends Zhou Tianlai for writing “the best brothel novel in the Shanghai style,” the million-character Big Sister from the Shabby Room (亭子間嫂嫂), serialized in 1938 and centered on an unlicensed prostitute named Gu Xiuzhen 顧秀珍, the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold (“a ray of light in the darkness of her occupation,” as Fan puts it) whose clientele represent a broad spectrum of urban society. Finally, Fan lauds the self-taught author Tian Shelang 田舍郎 for his skill at writing in the Shanghai vernacular about lower-class urban society in Shanghai’s alleyway neighborhoods during the 1940s. Regarded as Tian’s masterwork, Tailor Boy (小裁縫), tells the story of a tailor’s apprentice who uses nefarious means, ranging from extramarital affairs to female trafficking and rape, to climb the Shanghai social ladder, at the top of which he eventually acquires a high post in the city’s wartime occupation government. What most exercises Fan, however, is when this morally bankrupt protagonist suddenly “drops his base soul and turns out to be a patriotic figure” by virtue of assassinating an official of the occupation regime, a plot twist that for Fan defies narrative logic.

As already noted, Fan’s History culminates in the synthesis of popular and elite literature in the 1940s. Alongside Zhang Ailing’s work, Fan reviews novels by two lesser-known representatives of a “new generation” of popular writers of the time, Xu Xu and Bu Naifu (a.k.a. Wumingshi). Xu Xu, famous for his Love with a Ghost (鬼戀, 1937), which Fan interprets as a gothic novel, and Soughing Wind (風蕭蕭, 1943-1944), a wartime bestseller Fan describes as Western-influenced romantic spy fiction. All three writers, Zhang Ailing, Xu Xu, and Bu Naifu, Fan admires for their ability to “come and go freely” between popular and elite literature and thus, as mentioned earlier, attain a synthesis of the native and foreign elements of literary discourse.

Chapter 20 sums up the “history lessons” to be learned from the book’s survey of popular literature. Here Fan lists four main items. First, he observes how the urban basis of popular literature in general “enlightened” readers by helping migrants transition to a new life in the metropolis. Second, popular literature inherited and extended categories of traditional literature—“social romance, swordsman fiction, legal case fiction, palace novels, ironic novels and so on”—neglected by elite writers. Third, popular writers, because they were so close to the complexity and diversity of readers’ everyday lives, offered a uniquely detailed representation of social reality. Finally, Fan touches on the “opinion of the masses.” Here Fan’s explanation grows murky as he strains, in one lengthy paragraph, to encapsulate the relationship among popular writing, elite writing, and readers from the 1930s to the present day, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Perhaps inevitably, his analysis is fraught with confusing political tergiversation, as for example when he writes that “the proletariat selected the mainstream of elite literature that created public opinion for them to seize the regime” (751). Regarding the legacy of popular literature, Fan devises an extended architectural metaphor that captures rather well his aesthetic and moral vision of modern Chinese literature:

If we compare the excellent works of elite literature originating from foreign advanced ideas proposed by Lu Xun to beautiful villas and apartments, then some of the good works we introduced in Chapter 19 are like Chinese gardens, which are our cultural heritage, and the rest, although not qualified to be called “gardens,” are like “old houses” which, although “ancient,” deserve to be photographed and printed for research and nourishment. I do not intend to introduce those fakes in Chapter 19 because they belong to vulgar literature. They are like rubbish and pollutants at the time (752).

Fan tags an interesting epilogue onto his book: an essay on his efforts to collect the over 350 images included in History , from magazine covers and author portraits to old photographs of Shanghai’s publishing houses and dance halls. The author portraits in particular Fan justifiably values as a part of his project to give “equal treatment” to a group of writers systematically marginalized in modern literary history. Also, readers who have spent time searching through Chinese libraries and archives will sympathize with Fan’s painstaking detective work tracking down forgotten and ephemeral materials.

I expect most academic readers will find Fan’s History thought-provoking, though in a backhanded way, by which I mean the book’s many blind spots suggest certain opportunities for further research into popular literature. For instance, Fan’s tendency to look for “constructive” influences of the May Fourth elite tradition on popular literature could be turned around for a study of popular literature’s influence on the canon of “revolutionary” writers. One example that comes to mind are the pot-boiler revolutionary romances of an author like Jiang Guangci 蔣光慈. Similarly, and Fan does in fact touch on this very briefly in the context of martial arts fiction, is how the formulae and devices of urban popular literature were assimilated into socialist-era fiction and film. Another potential area of study is the aesthetics of seriality. Although Fan recognizes that nearly all the works discussed in History were published in installments, he reads them no differently than if they were written and read as finished works. Serial narrative, however, brings with it a raft of issues in both the production and reception, such as deferred closure, multiplication of subplots, interaction with contemporary social and political issues, response to reader feedback, collaborative and ritualized reading practices, and dependence for meaning on material location in a periodical. [2] Reading most any of the works in History with an eye to their seriality would be another potentially fruitful avenue of research. Another conspicuous absence in History are the 1930s Shanghai modernists, a group of writers who were marginalized much like Fan’s popular writers, and who published many of their stories in popular illustrated magazines. Why Fan leaves them out is anybody’s guess, but it might have to do with how modernism itself complicates the kind of historical teleology Fan undertakes, or it could be related to difficulties in categorizing the 1930s modernist writers’ as either “elite” or “popular.” Problems of categorization may also explain Fan’s omission of the very famous popular novel written by an “elite” author, Qian Zhongshu’s 錢鐘書 Besieged City (圍城). One more phenomenon that Fan sidesteps is the relation between the War of Resistance against Japan and the development of popular literature, be it in the form of martial arts fiction, “new” brothel novels, spy stories, or the early work of Zhang Ailing, all of which thrived when communities of “elite” writers dispersed to the interior of China. From Edward Gunn’s Unwelcome Muse to Christopher Rosenmeier’s On the Margins of Modernism , scholars have intermittently explored the literature of this period by writers outside leftist literary circles. Fan’s History suggests that there is much more to look into regarding wartime writing. In all, History ’s detailed coverage of so many lesser-known popular works and authors makes the book a useful resource for research into countless topics.

In part because it is a translation, History of Modern Chinese Popular Culture falls short in terms of providing some of the basic scholarly apparatus needed to help get such projects off the ground. An appendix lists the Romanized and Chinese names of most of the periodicals and literary works mentioned in the book, though without dates of publication. Authors’ names are provided only in pinyin, without accompanying Chinese characters. Also, Fan’s footnotes, all referring to Chinese-language sources, are simply translated into English without either Chinese or romanization. The book also lacks a bibliography. This kind of streamlining enhances the book’s readability, but at the expense of its utility, which is unfortunate because, in the end, most readers will come to History for its reference rather than its entertainment value. All the same, the book’s translators and Cambridge University Press deserve credit for making this uniquely sweeping study available to English-language audiences.

John A. Crespi Colgate University

[1] Please note that the translators of Fan’s History have devised their own English versions of the names of the publications and literary works mentioned in the book without reference to existing English-language translations. In this review I use the names as provided in History .

[2] See Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997) and Sean O’Sullivan, “Six Elements of Serial Narrative,” Narrative 27, no. 1 (2019): 49–64.

Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature

Author webpage

Cite Icon Cite
Permissions Icon Permissions

Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction tells the story of Chinese literature from antiquity to the present, focusing on the key role literary culture played in supporting social and political concerns. Embracing traditional Chinese understandings of literature as encompassing history and philosophy as well as poetry and poetics, storytelling, drama, and the novel, this VSI discusses the philosophical foundations of literary culture as well as literature's power to address historical trauma and cultivate moral and sensual passions. From ancient historical records through the modernization and globalization of Chinese literature, lively examples underscore the close relationship between ethics and aesthetics, as well as the diversity of Chinese thought.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

Google Scholar Indexing
GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]

Personal account

Sign in with email/username & password
Get email alerts
Save searches
Purchase content
Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
Institutional account management
Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutionâ€™s website and Oxford Academic.

Click Sign in through your institution.
Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutionâ€™s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see â€˜Sign in through society siteâ€™ in the sign in pane within a journal:

Click Sign in through society site.
When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

External resource

In the OUP print catalogue
About Oxford Academic
Publish journals with us
University press partners
What we publish
New features
Open access
Rights and permissions
Accessibility
Advertising
Media enquiries
Oxford University Press
Oxford Languages
University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
Cookie settings
Cookie policy
Privacy policy
Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

AsianStudies.org
Annual Conference
EAA Articles
Annual Conference March 14-17, 2024
AAS Community Forum Log In and Participate

Education About Asia: Online Archives

Chinese literature: an introduction.

Chinese literature is a pleasure to teach and to read; it holds an importance and relevance both in historical terms and in understanding the world today. Yet, its history, language and culture are quite rich, and different from much of the Western tradition that the study of Chinese literature can prove challenging. When Lucien Ellington first discussed with me the idea of writing a short introduction to Chinese literature, I was immensely intrigued about how to meet this challenge and give both students and teachers a book that would be rewarding and a pleasure to teach and read.

Chinese Literature: An Introduction is a chronologically-organized broad treatment ranging from the earliest writings up to the present. Starting with the oracle bones, we explore the literature of the early schools, examine the rich works of medieval and late imperial periods and finish with global China—writings that connect China closely with the world around it. On this journey, important genres, key writers and notable works are covered. Woven into this are sections on women’s writing and literature from Taiwan, Hong Kong and abroad, and examination of the texts of the philosophical, historical and religious traditions.

In this book, a practical and handy set of author excerpts function as a minianthology. Easy to use to demonstrate points, these excerpts also can be incorporated into classroom discussion. In addition, the volume includes references to numerous anthologies, translations of novels and studies of literature—including websites—that undergraduates can use for further research.

Cover for Chinese Literature: An Introduction

Understanding cultural context is key to reading literature, and in this book brief introductions are given to features of Chinese culture. For example, the spoken tones and written characters of the Chinese language had an impact on how literary forms developed and how texts were written. The ideas and practices involved with Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism are essential in understanding Chinese literature. The technological developments in literary production are also important in understanding why changes occurred—from the oral to textual to printed to online production.

Finally, I wanted to make the book entertaining. Each chapter begins with a brief and, hopefully, arresting anecdote designed to hook the reader. The poems I included were chosen because they also read well and address themes such as love, death, and friendship that students appreciate and find interesting. I attempt to provide in this book a succinct introduction to the rich history of Chinese literature, presenting enough threads that teachers could take students in any number of directions in their study of China.

IHOR PIDHAINY is Assistant Professor at the University of West Georgia in the Department of History, as well as being the Editor of the journal Ming Studies. He is the co-editor with Shuning Sciban of Reading Wang Wenxing: Critical Essays(Cornell East Asia Series). He specializes in the intellectual history of the Ming Dynasty, and is currently working on a biography of Yang Shen (1488-1559).

Research Guide for Chinese Studies

New/ on trial databases, harvard-yenching library digital collections, digital scholarship projects, research guides for east asian studies, chinese studies at harvard.

Historical Texts / Modern & Contemporary Texts / Gazetteers / Year Books / Rare Books / E-Books
Journals / Dissertations / Proceedings
Media / Newspapers
Maps / Arts / Images
Reference Tools
Bibliographies / Union Catalog
Archival Materials and Finding Aids
Useful Links for East Asian Studies

This guide provides an introduction to selected electronic resources for Chinese studies. Any suggestions, questions or comments, please contact Xiao-he Ma, Sharon Li-shiuan Yang . Thanks!

The Accessible World
Harvard-Yenching Library
Harvard Library
Harvard University
Harvard Library Event Calendar
Harvard University Event Calendar
News and Events from the Harvard-Yenching Institute
HYL Linktree
How to Search Harvard-Yenching Library Rare Books ( YouTube clip)
Harvard-Yenching Chinese Rubbings Title List 中文拓片清單
Harvard-Yenching Classification Scheme 哈佛燕京分类号
HYL Book Stacks Guide
Manchukuo Postcard title list 满洲国明信片清单
Naxi manuscripts - HYL access number vs. new number cross reference table
Naxi manuscripts - Rock's access number vs. new number cross reference table
Key Information for Using HYL Materials and Services
Harvard-Yenching Library Research Orientation Schedule, Spring 2024
Ainosco Search 是科探索 New more... less... Ainosco Search是科探索：https://www.ainoscosearch.com/ ID: hu2022 Password: 2022hu 試用期間: 即日起到2023/3/31 使用方式很簡單，只要搜尋關鍵字即可找到該關鍵字出現在那些圖書全文中。搜尋結果的左邊可選擇只出現"本館館藏"的圖書，或是有電子書全文的圖書，但由於目前是試用，電子書全文提供與否是按貴館是否有採購而呈現。如貴館正式訂購此數據庫就可以進行線上電子書使用。
China and the Modern World: Records of the Maritime Customs Service of China 1854–1949 On Trial (till 2023.10.9)
China Research Gateway (CRG) On Trial
ERUDITION Zhongguo yi shu ku 爱如生中国艺术库 On Trial (till 2024.04.11)
Fan yun wen xian 繙云文獻- 台灣文獻, 近代報刊, 滿鐵文獻 On Trial (till 2024.3.31) Access through Harvard VPN more... less... Created by 得泓資訊有限公司, Taiwan
History of the Communist Party of China Database 中共党史经典文献数据库 On Trial (till 2024.6.30) more... less... Access through VPN
Keledge E-Book Platform 可知电子书平台 New
Rural Studies Database 乡村研究数据 On Trial (till 2023.01.15)
SuperStar. Bailian Academic Search 百链学术搜索 On Trial (till 2024.2.15)
Wenxinge Full-text database of Chinese & Japanese Ancient Books 文心閣古籍數據庫 ( Diaolong Database 雕龍全文數據庫) On Trial (till 2023.3.31)
Bao Juan 寶卷 OPEN ACCESS
Carter D. Holton Photos Collection 海映光牧师中国甘青地区少数民族信仰文化老照片 OPEN ACCESS
Chinese Maritime Collection 中國舊海關資料 OPEN ACCESS
Chinese Old Local Gazetteers 中國舊方志 OPEN ACCESS
Chinese Rare Books- CURIOSity Digital Collection 中文善本特藏 OPEN ACCESS
Chinese Republican Period Collection 民國時期文獻 OPEN ACCESS
Chinese Rubbings- CURIOSity Digital Collection 中文拓片 OPEN ACCESS
Christianity Collection 基督教傳教士文獻 OPEN ACCESS
Dazibao and Woodcuts from 1960s China 大字报
Digital Maps- China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau 数字地圖 OPEN ACCESS
Edwards Bangs Drew Chinese Maritime Customs Services Photographs 爱德华兹班德鲁中国旧海关服务时期老照片
Er Qi Collection 二齊 (齊耀琳, 齊耀珊) 藏书 OPEN ACCESS
Hart Collection 哈特教授藏書 OPEN ACCESS
Harvard-Yenching Library Digital Maps 数字地图 OPEN ACCESS
Harvard-Yenching Library Online Photographs
Hedda Morrison Photograph Albums more... less... https://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990152811020203941/catalog
Hedda Morrison Photographs of China 赫逹莫里森中國老照片, 1933-1946 OPEN ACCESS more... less... All of the photographs contained in the 28 albums assembled by Hedda Morrison and beaqueathed to Harvard-Yenching Library have been cataloged and digitized and can be viewed in VIA (Visual Information Access), the union catalog of visual resources at Harvard. This site provides information about the collection and strategies for effectively searching for Hedda Morrison photographs in VIA.
Japanese Rare Books 日文善本古籍 OPEN ACCESS
John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer "Rice Paddies" Lantern Slide Collection 费正清教授，海肖爾教授 “稻田” 课程教學幻燈片 OPEN ACCESS
Joseph F. Rock Collection 约瑟夫.洛克中国老照片
Korean Rare Books 韓文善本古籍 OPEN ACCESS
Manchukuo Collection- Digital maps 滿洲國收藏- 地圖類 OPEN ACCESS
Manchukuo Collection- Postcards 滿洲國收藏- 明信片 OPEN ACCESS
Manchu Rare Books 滿文古籍 OPEN ACCESS
Ming-Qing Women's Writings 明清婦女著作 (McGill University Library 合作項目) OPEN ACCESS
Mongolian Rare Books 蒙文古籍 OPEN ACCESS
Naxi Manuscripts 納西東巴經 OPEN ACCESS
North Korean Posters 北朝鲜海报 more... less... Korea Institute - Harvard-Yenching Library North Korean poster digitization project
Prof. Hanan's Personal Collection 韩南教授藏书 OPEN ACCESS
Qi Rushan Collection 齊如山藏書 OPEN ACCESS
Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection on Muslims in China 畢敬士中國穆斯林和基督教传教士老照片 OPEN ACCESS
Souvenir de Chine photos 中日二次战争照片集 OPEN ACCESS
(CBDB) China Biographical Database 中國歷代人物傳記資料庫 OPEN ACCESS
Academia Sinica Digital Humanities Research Platform 中央研究院數位人文研究平台
Academia Sinica Digital Humanities Research Platform 中研院數位人文研究平台操作說明 YouTube playlist (Chinese only)
Academia Sinica Text Recognition and Proofreading Platform 中央研究院文字辨識與校對平台
Archive it - Greater China Archival Resources Web Archive 檔案指南 OPEN ACCESS New more... less... For a blog post that may be redistributed across the Confederation, please see the following: https://ivpluslibraries.org/2020/09/iplc-launches-the-greater-china-archival-resources-web-archive/.
BiogRef- Distributed Metadata Sharing for Online Biographical Information OPEN ACCESS
Buddhist Studies Authority Database Project 佛學規範資料庫 OPEN ACCESS
CBDB Ontology on WebVOWL
CBDB Ontology 上海图书馆 CBDB 本体
China Historical GIS 中国历史地理信息系统 OPEN ACCESS
Chinese Ancient Text Electronic Resources Cross-cat Query System 电子汉籍联合目录 OPEN ACCESS
Chinese Iconography Thesaurus 中國圖像誌索引典 OPEN ACCESS
Chinese Text Project (ctext.org ) 中國哲學書電子化計劃 OPEN ACCESS
Contemporary Chinese Village Gazetteers Data (CCVG ) 数字村庄
CrossAsia Fulltext Search
Cultural Japan
DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard)
Data Science Services 哈佛定量社會科學分析中心IQSS
Digital Collections for Chinese Studies (Dashboard link)
Digital Collections for Chinese Studies（WebApp link)
Digital Dunhuang 數字敦煌 OPEN ACCESS
Digital Humanities Platform of Shanghai Library 上海圖書館歷史人文大數據平台
DocuSky BETA 工具集
Exploring Republican China in the USC Digital Library- An Experimental Metadata Analysis
THE FIRST EMPEROR OF CHINA(秦始皇) - Global Memory Net Project
Han Cloud Search Platform 漢雲平台
Harvard Dataverse Support
Harvard University Digital Scholarship Events
Harvard University Digital Scholarship Support Group
Harvard WorldMap OPEN ACCESS
Historical Document Crowd Sourcing Platform 上海图书馆历史文献众包台
Huihui Islamic Scholars in Late Ming and Early Qing 明末清初回回伊斯兰学者行迹图
The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online (IDP) 國際敦煌項目 OPEN ACCESS
MARKUS- Text Analysis and Reading Platform for Literary Chinese 瑪庫斯平台 OPEN ACCESS more... less... .With MARKUS you can upload a file in classical Chinese and tag personal names, place names, temporal references, and bureaucratic offices automatically. You can also upload your own list of key terms for automated tagging. You can then read a document while checking a range of reference works at the same time, or compare passages in which the same names or keywords appear. Or, you can extract the information you have tagged and use it for further analysis in our visualization platform and other tools. The March 2015 release includes: -improvements in automated markup: emperor names have been added and alternate names markup improved to reduce superfluous alternate name markup -inline text editing: correct mistakes or add punctuation to the base text -switching between markup modes: choose between modes from the left bar; no need to re-upload files -new keyword markup functionality: automatically discover keywords and select appropriate ones for markup -additional dictionaries in reading mode: trials for Buddhist and medical term dictionaries -full Chinese language version -links to relevant tools: starting with the newly released CBDB name/official title lookup tool -updated and expanded help text and videos -FAQ: for technical problems and useful markup tips Also added two new tools: 1) The CBDB Mac Dictionary allows readers to search China Biographical Database by either using Mac OS X integrated Spotlight or by selecting any name or partial name in any software programme; 2) The CBDB Name/Title Lookup helps readers identify persons for whom only part of the name AND an official title or part thereof are known.
MeToo and the Women’s Movement in China. Collected by: Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation
Old Maps Online- the search engine for historical maps OPEN ACCESS
Open LoGaRT- Rare Local Gazetteers at Harvard-Yenching Library: Open Access Collection
Research Platform of Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center 北京大学数字人文研究中心研究平台
TextRef- Distributed Metadata Sharing for Online Historical Textual Resources 電子漢籍綜目 OPEN ACCESS
Harvard-Yenching Library Archival Materials
People's Republic of China Legal Research
Republic of China (Taiwan) Legal Research
Research Guide for East Asian Studies
Research Guide for Japanese Studies
Research Guide for Korean Studies
Streaming Video Resources at Harvard
Asia Center
China Public Policy Program
Columbia-Harvard 中国与世界研究项目 China and the World Program
Committee on Regional Studies -- East Asia
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
East Asian Legal Studies
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Harvard-Yenching Institute
Next: Historical Texts / Modern & Contemporary Texts / Gazetteers / Year Books / Rare Books / E-Books >>
Last Updated: Mar 26, 2024 4:49 PM
URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/Chinese

Harvard University Digital Accessibility Policy

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

View all journals
My Account Login
Explore content
About the journal
Publish with us
Sign up for alerts
Open access
Published: 09 June 2023

Disentangling the cultural evolution of ancient China: a digital humanities perspective

Siyu Duan 1 , 2 ,
Jun Wang 1 , 2 , 3 ,
Hao Yang 2 , 3 &
Qi Su 2 , 3 , 4

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 10 , Article number: 310 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

5292 Accesses

1 Citations

4 Altmetric

Metrics details

Anthropology
Cultural and media studies
Language and linguistics

Being recognized among the cradles of human civilization, ancient China nurtured the longest continuous academic traditions and humanistic spirits, which continue to impact today’s society. With an unprecedented large-scale corpus spanning 3000 years, this paper presents a quantitative analysis of cultural evolution in ancient China. Millions of intertextual associations are identified and modelled with a hierarchical framework via deep neural network and graph computation, thus allowing us to answer three progressive questions quantitatively: (1) What is the interaction between individual scholars and philosophical schools? (2) What are the vicissitudes of schools in ancient Chinese history? (3) How did ancient China develop a cross-cultural exchange with an externally introduced religion such as Buddhism? The results suggest that the proposed hierarchical framework for intertextuality modelling can provide sound suggestions for large-scale quantitative studies of ancient literature. An online platform is developed for custom data analysis within this corpus, which encourages researchers and enthusiasts to gain insight into this work. This interdisciplinary study inspires the re-understanding of ancient Chinese culture from a digital humanities perspective and prompts the collaboration between humanities and computer science.

Evol project: a comprehensive online platform for quantitative analysis of ancient literature

Jun Wang, Siyu Duan, … Qi Su

Network analysis reveals insights about the interconnections of Judaism and Christianity in the first centuries CE

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal & Yossi Yovel

Evolution and transformation of early modern cosmological knowledge: a network study

Maryam Zamani, Alejandro Tejedor, … Holger Kantz

Introduction

Although still in its infancy, digital humanities research supported by big data and deep learning has become a hot topic in recent years. Researchers began to use digital methods to study cultural issues quantitatively, such as examining cultural evolution (Lewens 2015 ) through the diachronic changes of n-gram frequency (Michel et al. 2011 ; Lansdall-Welfare et al. 2017 ; Alshaabi et al. 2021 ; Newberry and Plotkin 2022 ) and word-level semantics (Newberry et al. 2017 ; Garg et al. 2018 ; Kozlowski et al. 2019 ; Giulianelli et al. 2020 ). This trend also spread to the study of ancient civilizations. Scholars from different cultural backgrounds have investigated the culture of ancient Rome (Dexter et al. 2017 ), ancient Greece (Assael et al. 2022 ), and Natufian (Resler et al. 2021 ) with the assistance of computer technology. It is acknowledged that ancient China was one of the longest-standing civilizations in human history, with a culture that evolved over the past thousands of years. Various ancient literature has been handed down over time, providing extensive textual records of Chinese culture. With the digitized versions of these classics, we can gain a glimpse into the cultural evolution in ancient China.

Ancient Chinese classics are highly intertextual texts. Since the doctrine “A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients” proposed in Analects (Legge 1861 . VII.I), quoting previous texts became a convention of literary creation in ancient China. Chinese scholars have long studied this cultural phenomenon from different perspectives. For example, Pan-ma i-t’ung (published around AD 1200) demonstrated the character differences between two history books, Records of the Grand Historian (published around 91 BC) and Book of Han (published around AD 82). Since Qing Dynasty, scholars began to enumerate parallel intertextual associations between ancient classics (Chen 1989 ; He et al. 2004 ). However, intertextuality (Kristeva 1980 ) is not only the connections of words and phrases but also manifests at higher levels hierarchically (Riffaterre 1994 ; Alfaro 1996 ), such as document, author, and community. The traditional form of high-level intertextuality studies was the overall literary criticism by scholars. For example, Ming dynasty scholar Ling Zhilong compiled previous scholars’ literary criticism of the above two history books. Literary criticism was themed on the style, skill, and viewpoints of literature, which was seen as a formidable endeavour due to the complexity of Chinese culture. Both parallel enumeration and literary criticism are limited by the reading and memory of scholars, which restricts the discussion on the large-scale corpus. Assisted by computer technology and digital literature, scholars recently began to study intertextuality within large-scale data.

Various natural language processing (NLP) methods have been applied to the intertextuality modelling of ancient literature. The previous automatic detection methods of text-level intertextuality aimed to discover similar phrases or sequences by lexical matching approach (Lee 2007 ; Coffee et al. 2012a ; Coffee et al. 2012b ; Ganascia et al. 2014 ; Forstall et al. 2015 ), which are insufficient and rigid in semantic modelling. The non-literal feature like synonym (Büchler et al. 2014 ; Moritz et al. 2016 ) and rhythm (Neidorf et al. 2019 ) also implies intertextuality, yet it requires language-specific design. Topic modelling lends a hand to passage-level modelling (Scheirer et al. 2016 ), while its dependence on expert annotation limits its generalization on diverse corpora. Simple statistics on text-level results contribute to document-level modelling (Hartberg and Wilson 2017 ). However, it ignores their overall connections. Besides, graph structure seems to be an appropriate way for the community-level modelling of intertextuality (Romanello 2016 ; Rockmore et al. 2018 ). Intertextuality modelling on classical literature widely supports cultural studies, such as quantitative literary criticism and stylometry (Forstall et al. 2011 ; Burns et al. 2021 ). Existing related studies on Chinese literature were limited to the detection methods (Liang et al. 2021 ; Li et al. 2022 ; Yu et al. 2022 ) and shallow studies of intertextual texts on small corpora (Sturgeon 2018a ; Sturgeon 2018b ; Huang et al. 2021 ; Deng et al. 2022 ), short of macroanalysis (Jockers 2013 ) on Chinese culture.

In this paper, we conducted a macroanalysis of ancient Chinese culture on an unprecedented large-scale corpus spanning nearly 3000 years. Figure 1a presents a schematic of this corpus. This corpus consists of 30,880 articles from 201 ancient Chinese books (or anthologies). It covers various topics, such as philosophy, religion, and politics, including the famous works of major cultural groups (e.g., Analects of Confucianism; Tao Te Ching of Taoism). The history books (e.g., Book of Han) and comprehensive anthologies (e.g., Collected Works of Han) of each era are also involved.

a The dataset of ancient Chinese literature with an instance in each era. The names of the dynasties and the approximate AD years are marked on the timeline. For each period, it gives one instance book and indicates its subject. b Hierarchical framework with three modules for multilevel intertextuality modelling.

In this work, we modelled ancient Chinese literature with a hierarchical framework. The cultural thought of civilization is composed of multiple levels, such as doctrines, individuals, and communities. Moreover, cultural evolution manifests hierarchically with microevolution and macroevolution (Mesoudi 2017 ; Gray and Watts 2017 ). A comprehensive discussion of cultural evolution requires multilevel perspectives. Therefore, this framework models intertextual associations from the text level to the community level with three modules. A schematic of the framework is shown in Fig. 1b . The text-level detection module tracks intertextual sentences with deep-learning models. The book-level aggregation module gathers text-level clues and abstracts various books into an association graph. The community-level inference module applies topological propagation to explore intertextual associations in the cultural community. After the modelling, millions of intertextual sentence pairs and a book-level intertextual association graph are ready for cultural analysis.

In the experiment, we detected 2.6 million pairs of intertextual sentences and then built them into an association graph. For a specific text collection, its intertextual distribution refers to its quantitative intertextual associations with other texts. Based on the modelling results, we can study ancient Chinese culture through the intertextual distribution among ancient literature.

In the cultural analysis, we considered cultural evolution from the perspective of cultural groups and religions. Schools of thought and religions were part and parcel of ancient Chinese culture (Schwartz 1985 ). The Hundred Schools of Thought that originated in the axial age were the prototype of ancient Chinese philosophy (Graham 1989 ). They rose and fell over the millennia that followed. The introduction of foreign cultures, like Buddhism (Chen 1964 ), also influenced the evolution of native culture. In this paper, we disentangled the cultural evolution of ancient China on three levels: (1) The interaction between individual scholars and philosophical schools; (2) The rise and fall of schools in Chinese history and culture; (3) The cross-culture communication with Buddhism.

Specifically, we validated several acknowledged cultural phenomena: the evolutionary paths of Confucianism and Taoism, and the booms and declines of the Hundred Schools of Thought. We also provided quantitative suggestions for cultural problems that are yet to be definitely resolved, such as the school attribution of Lüshi Chunqiu , the authorship attribution of Collected Works of Tao Yuanming , and the influence of Confucianism and Taoism across different cultural domains. Furthermore, we quantitatively discussed the interaction between Buddhism and native culture, revealing how cultural integration has evolved over time.

In addition, we have developed an online platform to display this corpus, along with millions of intertextual associations detected in this work. The platform supports custom data analysis, which encourages researchers and enthusiasts to gain insight into this work.

Two datasets were built respectively, the classic dataset and the era-text dataset. We considered several factors when building the dataset: era balance, representativeness, and official-folk balance. Two datasets consist of 30,880 articles from 201 books (or anthologies).

Classic dataset

The classic dataset is composed of the most prominent and influential books that represent the core culture of ancient China. Before the Tang Dynasty (618–907), literature was copied manually. Due to the long history and the limitations of publishing technology, only time-tested classics have been handed down to this day. Therefore, we added all the collected pre-Tang literature to the classic dataset. In the Tang Dynasty, the invention of block printing led to the rapid development of the publishing industry, resulting in explosive growth in the amount of literature. Until the mid-18th century, China printed more books than the rest of the world combined (Gernet 1996 ). Considering that this study focuses on the evolution of early thought in ancient China, we selected several most famous classics after Tang Dynasty. The well-known digital library of ancient Chinese classics, CTEXT ( https://ctext.org/ ), also adopted similar rules to build a collection of core classics. We considered the literature samples of CTEXT and built the classic dataset.

Our research focuses on ideological evolution, so books in the classic dataset should reflect cultural thought with good data quality. Therefore, we further screened the classic dataset to filter out inappropriate books, including commentary books, mathematics books, dictionaries, excavated literature (e.g., Mawangdui Silk Texts), and lengthy novels.

Finally, the dataset of ancient Chinese classics contains 133 books, including 8984 articles. Table 1 shows the time-period statistics of this corpus. It covers various aspects of culture, such as philosophy, mythology, politics, and religion. In this dataset, the earliest book was created around 1000 BC (e.g., Book of Documents), while the latest book was published around AD 1750 (e.g., The Scholars).

Era-text dataset

We aim for the era-text dataset to reflect the contemporary culture of each period, encompassing both official and folk traditions. To achieve this, we set our sights on history books and anthologies. As ancient China had a tradition of producing history books for each dynasty, history books typically reflected official attitudes. We added the official history (Twenty-Four Histories), large-scale chronicle history books ( Zizhi Tongjian and Continued Zizhi Tongjian Changbian ), and 15 other influential history books to the era dataset. In addition, we included Quan shang gu san dai Qin Han San guo Liu chao wen , a series of large-scale anthologies organized by era. It collected a wide variety of works from numerous authors, including prose, essays, religious scriptures, inscriptions, etc. These anthologies comprehensively record the contemporary culture of ancient China. To further enrich the era-text dataset, we added 13 well-proofread anthologies.

We categorized these history books and anthologies by era. For history books (e.g., Zizhi Tongjian ) that cover multiple eras, we divided them into corresponding eras. Finally, we got 55 history books and 13 anthologies, containing 21,896 articles. Table 2 shows the time-period statistics of this corpus. These works chronicle Chinese history and culture from the legendary period (e.g., Bamboo Annals , from 2600 BC) to the Ming Dynasty (e.g., History of Ming , ending in AD 1644).

Data processing

Ancient Chinese characters may have multiple written forms, we use the open-source toolkit OpenCC ( https://github.com/BYVoid/OpenCC ) to map them to a unique root character before encoding them using deep learning models. The maximum sentence length was set to 50 characters. Sentences exceeding this length were divided into two sentences. This setting can cover more than 99% of sentences.

Intertextuality detection usually aims to discover meaningful textual connections. It is important to note that texts without actual meaning cannot indicate the ideological connection between texts. Therefore, we use additional computational rules to avoid inappropriate text pairs. First, we filtered out sentences (clauses) with less than three remaining characters after removing the stopwords (such as prepositions and pronouns). Then, with predefined rules, we filtered out meaningless sentences, such as tone, dates, lengths, quantities, and formats. After filtering, there are about 436,000 sentences with 840,000 clauses in the classic’s dataset, and 2,113,000 sentences with 4,526,000 clauses in the era-text dataset.

Challenge and limitation

The collection and processing of ancient Chinese literature present challenges and limitations. Although we used punctuated text in this work, the original ancient Chinese literature has no punctuation. When it comes to no-punctuation data, an automatic punctuation model should be applied beforehand. Moreover, ancient literature could have multiple versions. In our dataset, we opted to include only one widely circulated version of each book. It may restrict the applicability of the dataset for researchers interested in different versions.

Additionally, the selection of appropriate literature collections for cultural analysis from a vast pool of ancient literature requires expert knowledge. In our study, humanities scholars specializing in Chinese history and philosophy were consulted.

Modelling framework

Considering that intertextuality and cultural evolution can manifest at multiple levels, we developed a hierarchical framework to analyze ancient literature. This framework captures intertextuality at three levels, ranging from micro to macro. At the text level, similar sentence pairs shared between books are detected by deep neural networks. At the book level, books are abstracted into an intertextual association graph based on the text-level results. At the community level, information propagates through the topological structure of the book-level graph, thus exploring intertextuality in the cultural community. This hierarchical approach provides both micro-evidence and macro-quantification for intertextual associations and cultural evolution.

Text-level detection

The study of cultural evolution is concerned with the connections of thoughts. Each sentence often expresses a distinct thought, making it a suitable quantitative unit. Therefore, we traced the intertextuality at the sentence level. We considered that the more similar sentences the two books share, the more closely connected they are.

The dissemination of text is not static but mutates. The micro-evolution of texts has multiple patterns (Tamariz 2019 ), such as replication, expansion, and succession. Therefore, this module traced similar sentence pairs shared between books with three patterns: overall similarity, partial similarity, and paraphrased similarity. A sketch is given in Fig. 2a .

a Three patterns of similarity between sentences. Darker colour indicates more similar text. b The explicit intertextuality and implicit intertextuality between the three books.

Overall similarity

Two sentences explain the similar meaning with close language expressions.

Partial similarity

Two sentences share similar parts.

Paraphrased similarity

The similar meaning is explained by different language expressions. The text may be disrupted and reorganized.

Deep neural networks (Vaswani et al. 2017 ) and pre-train methods (Devlin et al. 2019 ) have shown excellent performance in text feature extraction. Contrastive learning (Chen et al. 2020 ) can help to obtain personal-defined text similarity models without supervision, which is suitable for text-level intertextuality detection. To get sentence representation for these three patterns, we introduced the RoBERTa base (Liu et al. 2019 ), a pre-trained language model that can be further fine-tuned for our task using different training strategies.

For the overall similarity pattern, it can be treated as the overall semantic similarity between sentences. To train the model 1 , we used SimCSE (Gao et al. 2021 ), a contrastive learning method for extracting sentence embeddings.

For the paraphrased similarity pattern, the sentence structure could be reconstructed. We trained another model 2 for this pattern, with its loss being a weighted sum of loss 1 and loss 2 . The loss 1 was calculated in the same way as for model 1 .

For loss 2 , we randomly dropped and shuffled the clauses and n-grams in the original sentence to obtain a new sentence. It serves as another positive sample of contrastive learning. Negative samples are other sentences in the batch. The final loss for the model 2 is:

r is a hyperparameter that modulates the emphasis between sentence structure and semantics.

For the partial similarity pattern, sentences are considered similar if they share similar clauses. We detected similarities at the clause level using both model 1 and model 2 .

In large-scale information retrieval, brute-force search is often impractical due to the time and resources required. Therefore, it usually follows a multi-step process for the balance of precision and efficiency.

The first step is to recall potential candidates. In our work, we identified K members that were most similar to each sentence embedding. Then, we selected appropriate candidates and calculated a threshold to further filter out similar candidates.

For each pattern, we used the following steps to detect:

1. Extract embeddings of all sentences using the RoBERTa model.

2. De-duplicate embeddings. For each embedding, find its Top K similar embeddings. Denote all embedding pairs obtained as P .

3. Calculate the Euclidean distance of embedding in P and find the t th percentile as the similarity threshold d thr .

4. Filter out sentence pairs whose embedding distance is closer than d thr .

We detected similar pairs with these three strategies separately and gathered their results. The detected similar sentence pairs give concrete evidence of text-level intertextuality.

Book-level aggregation

Text-level results can support textual research on microevolution. However, to analyze at the macro level, text-level results must be gathered and aggregated. In this module, we aggregated text-level intertextuality results and synthesized them into a book-level intertextual association graph g . In this graph, each node B i represents a book, and there are N books in total. The edges indicate the intertextual associations between books. Suppose there are two books B i and B j , they contain n i and n j distinct sentences, respectively, and s ij distinct similar sentence pairs were detected between them. The edge weight α ij between B i and B j is calculated as follows:

For node B i , it has a one-hot node feature $x_i = [x_{i1},x_{i2} \ldots x_{iN}]$ , where ${x_{ii}} = {1}$ .

Community-level inference

Text-level intertextuality can be observed explicitly. However, some intertextual connections can be implicit, with no direct textual association. In this study, we treated these classics as a cultural community and explored the implicit intertextuality at the community level. A schematic is shown in Fig. 2b .

Explicit intertextuality

If two books share similar sentences, they are explicitly intertextual.

Implicit intertextuality

If Book 1 and Book 2 are explicitly intertextual, and Book 2 and Book 3 are explicitly intertextual, then it can be inferred that Book 1 and Book 3 are implicitly intertextual.

This module performs inference by propagating and aggregating information through the topology of the intertextual association graph:

The first operation gathers explicit intertextuality I ex to the node feature. The second operation infers and integrates the implicit intertextuality I im . r ′ is a custom weight that adjusts the emphasis of implicit intertextuality. After twice graph computations, the node feature of B i is $y_i = [y_{i1},y_{i2} \ldots y_{iN}]$ , where y ij indicates the united intertextual score I ij between B i and B j .

The node feature reflects the distribution of intertextuality for each book within the community. Excessive aggregation of information on the graph can lead to over-smoothing, which is detrimental to node features. Therefore, we set the number of graph computations to twice. Sparsity is an issue that often plagues text-based cultural analysis. With this method, the sparsity of intertextuality detection results can be alleviated.

Settings and modelling results

In text-level detection, we trained the model on an Nvidia 1080ti GPU. The optimizer is Adam (Kingma and Ba 2015 ). We took the pre-trained ancient Chinese RoBERTa base model as a basis. For both model 1 and model 2 , we fine-tuned the base model 10 epochs at a learning rate of 1e-6. The batch size was 32. The r for the loss of model 2 was set to 0.2. For similarity detection, we set K to 100 and t to 1 based on our data scale and observations. The large-scale vector searching tool Faiss (Johnson et al. 2019 ) was applied to speed up vector retrieval.

In book-level aggregation, we found that diverse genres have variant punctuation styles, disturbing the total number of sentences. After observation, we found that in this dataset, the number of sentences with at least two clauses is relatively stable. Therefore, we set the number of sentences n i of the book B i to the number of sentences with at least two clauses.

In community-level inference, r ′ was set to a value that makes implicit intertextuality one-fifth of explicit intertextuality. $x_i^\prime$ and I im were clipped with a ten-fold mean. In the modelling after adding era-text, the information propagation between era-text nodes was blocked to evaluate each era independently.

As a result, the detection module identified over 411,000 pairs of similar sentences between classics and 2,209,000 pairs between classics and era-text. An intertextual association graph was built from these pairs.

Manual evaluation of text-level detection

Note that in this corpus, each sentence has millions of intertextual candidates from books on diverse topics. As a result, the likelihood of any two sentences being intertextual is extremely low. Building a hand-labelled test set to evaluate the recall rate is nearly impossible. Therefore, we manually evaluated the accuracy rate with the same number of recalled sentences.

We invited three people with graduate degrees and research experience in Chinese classical literature to conduct the manual evaluation. The evaluators were asked to assess the intertextuality of each detected sentence pair. If the two sentences share a similar meaning, topic, or structural style, give 1 point. Otherwise, give 0 points. We took the single-pattern methods as baselines. We used the SIMCSE (Gao et al. 2021 ) model to detect the same number of pairs at the sentence and clause levels, respectively. One pair is randomly sampled from each book in the dataset of classics. There are three groups with 133 pairs each.

The results are shown in Table 3 . The average accuracy of our proposed multi-pattern detection model is 82.22% ( Pearson ’ s r = 0.74), while the single-pattern baseline is 73.70% and 45.92%. It suggests that the multi-pattern design can improve intertextuality detection performance.

Ablation of community-level inference

We performed an ablation study on a specific book to validate the designed inference module. Figure 3 shows the intertextual connection between Analects and other classics. To compare the modules fairly, we adjusted the weights r ′ so that explicit and implicit intertextuality have equal status in united intertextuality.

They are mean-normalized, and their standard deviations are given respectively. a Number of similar sentence pairs s . b Explicit intertextual scores I ex . c Implicit intertextual scores I im . d United intertextual scores I .

The number of similar pairs varies widely due to the varying length of books. After aggregation, normalized explicit intertextual scores are obtained. However, some books do not share similar sentences, resulting in vacancies. Implicit intertextual scores are positively correlated with explicit intertextuality. It fills the gap of explicit intertextuality and alleviates sparsity. In addition, the introduction of implicit intertextuality brings smoothness, leading to more robust united intertextual scores ( std = 0.81) than explicit intertextual scores ( std = 1.07).

Indicator robustness

A metric that is susceptible to data variance is not ideal. Therefore, we examined these two concerns regarding the intertextual score I :

• Q 1 : Is the intertextual score affected evidently by data size?

• Q 2 : Does the intertextual score decrease noticeably due to language discrepancy in different eras?

For Q 1 , we calculated the correlation between data size and intertextuality with the classic dataset. The two variables used in the correlation calculation are as follows:

Data Size: the number of sentences involved in intertextuality detection for each book.

Intertextual Score: The average intertextual score of each book with all other books.

Our results show that there was no significant correlation between data size and intertextual score ( $r = - 0.1427,\,P = 0.1025,\,n = 133$ ). Therefore, we considered that the decrease in the H index is not due to data size.

For Q 2 , let us examine some cases. Jin Si Lu of the Song Dynasty (published around 1175) and Chuan Xi Lu of the Ming Dynasty (published around 1472–1529) are two famous works of Neo-Confucianism, which emerged as a continuation of Confucianism thousands of years after its birth. Compared with previous books, is the intertextuality between these two books and Confucianism prominent?

To answer this question, we ranked the intertextual scores between all books and keystone works of Confucianism and observed where these two books are placed. We found that these two books rank highly (1/131, 2/131), even surpassing Confucian books that are more recent to the Axial period. Therefore, we consider that language differences across different eras do not have an obvious impact on the intertextual score.

Through these two examinations, we can conclude that the indicator, intertextual score I , is robust to data variance.

Study 1. Interaction between scholars and schools

At the first level, we discussed the interaction between scholars and schools. Schools can be remoulded by later generations of scholars during their thousands of years of evolution. Confucianism and Taoism were the most influential philosophical schools in ancient China. We examined their evolutionary paths by assessing the preference of their followers through intertextual distributions of literary works. Besides, some literature is controversial or ambiguous in the mists of antiquity. To clarify the true path of cultural evolution, we provided quantitative suggestions for the school attribution of Lüshi Chunqiu and the authorship attribution of the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming .

In the axial age, religion and philosophy transformed drastically in various civilizations. The Hundred Schools of Thought, which arose in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (500 BC), were the prototype of Chinese philosophy. The enduring and pervasive influence of schools such as Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, Legalism, and Military make them essential to any discussion of ancient Chinese culture (Sima 1959 ; Ban 1962 ).

Scholars and schools are symbiotic. Scholars were inevitably exposed to mainstream schools of their periods, while the doctrines of schools needed to be passed down to subsequent scholars. In this section, we investigated the interaction between scholars and schools through the intertextual associations of their literature. We calculated the Tendency Index T between 125 ancient Chinese classics and the five schools mentioned above. This index shows the ideological tendency of a particular collection of texts toward each school. The schematic diagram of this index is shown in Fig. 4a , and the details of its design are as follows.

a Calculation of Tendency Index T . b Calculation of Historical Status Index H .

Based on the consensus of Chinese philosophy (Feng and Bodde 1948 ), we selected the keystone works as the benchmarks for each school. We first calculated the average intertextual score between a book and the keystone works of each school. The Tendency Index is defined as the ratio of the average intertextual score with a specific school to its means across all schools. Suppose there are books $B = \{ B_1,B_2 \ldots B_m\}$ and schools $S = \{ S_1,S_2 \ldots S_v\}$ . The intertextual score between any two books B i and B j is I ij , which can be obtained from the node features of the association graph. For the book B i and the school S k , the school S k has l keystone works, T ik is calculated as follows:

T ik reflects the tendency of book B i for school S k compared to other schools. When T ik > 1, Book B i has an above-average preference for school S k .

We also examined the significance of text-level intertextuality. Specifically, we investigated whether sentences from a specific book have a significantly greater probability of being detected in the keystone works of a school than the average of other schools. Considering that these books typically contain a large number of sentences $({\text{Median}} = 2739)$ , we employed a one-tailed Z -test statistic. This statistic was constructed from the similar sentence pairs detected. Suppose there are books B i and B j containing n i and n j sentences after data processing. There are s ij distinct similar sentence pairs detected between them. For book B i and school S k , the calculation of test statistic Z is as follows:

We set the significance level α to 0.05. With the Tendency Index and P-value , we developed quantitative discussions on the scholar-school linkages.

Evolutionary path of philosophical schools

The schools in ancient China were constantly evolving as scholars reshaped previous theories. As acknowledged in the history of Chinese philosophy (Feng and Bodde 1948 ), the original Taoist philosophy inspired the Taoist religion and Wei Jin metaphysics, while Neo-Confucianism inherited the theories of Confucianism. This section validates these evolutionary paths of Taoism and Confucianism quantitatively.

Taoism was a philosophical school that mainly advocated conformity to nature. Taoist religion evolved from Taoist philosophy, developing into the most prominent native religion until now (Raz 2012 ). The representatives of Taoist philosophy, Laozi and Zhuangzi, were revered as the founder and patriarch of the Taoist religion respectively. Figure 5a shows the Tendency Index of two Taoist religious classics, Cantongqi and Wen Shi Zhen Jing . They were significantly inclined towards Taoist philosophy ( Cantongqi , $T = 2.48$ , $P = 0.0142$ , $n = 529$ ; Wen Shi Zhen Jing , $T = 2.62$ , $P = 0.0019$ , $n = 879$ , for Taoism). It demonstrates the consistency between Taoist religion and Taoist philosophy in their evolution.

The dynasty of publication and the corresponding AD years of each book are shown below. The keystone works of each school are listed on the right, including the time of the publication. a Tendency Index of two Taoist classics, Cantongqi and Wen Shi Zhen Jing . And the Tendency Index of the collected works of two scholars, Ruan Ji and Ji Kang. b Tendency Index of two Neo-Confucianism classics, Jin Si Lu and Chuan Xi Lu . c Tendency Index of Lüshi Chunqiu . d Tendency Index of the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming . And the Tendency Index of its widely accepted and controversial parts.

Apart from the religious re-creation, Taoism inspired a new school of philosophy. Wei Jin metaphysics, a variant of Taoist philosophy, arose during the Three Kingdoms period (220–280) and flourished in the Jin Dynasty (266–420). Ruan Ji and Ji Kang were two representative scholars. Figure 5a shows the Tendency Index of their collected works. Compared with the other four schools, scholars of Wei Jin metaphysics were closer to the theories of Taoism ( Collected Works of Ruan Ji , $n = 1590$ ; Collected Works of Ji Kang , $P = 3.57e - 06$ , $n = 2209$ , for Taoism).

This kind of transformation also occurred in Confucianism. Confucianism, which originated in 500 BC (Yao 2000 ), had an extensive impact on ancient Chinese culture and spread throughout East Asia. Over millennia, the philosophy evolved, and Neo-Confucianism became the new representative of Confucianism in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) (Bol 2008 ). Jin Si Lu and Chuan Xi Lu , written by Zhu Xi, Lv Zuqian, and Wang Yanming, were two of the most famous classics. Their Tendency Index is shown in Fig. 5b . The significant intertextual connection between the two works and Confucianism confirms their inheritance ( Jin Si Lu , $T = 2.84$ , $P = 1.01e - 13$ , $n = 2914$ ; Chuan Xi Lu , $T = 3.36$ , $P = 2.33e - 15$ , $n = 2495$ , for Confucianism).

Controversial literature attribution

Because of its antiquity, the information of some classics has become vague over thousands of years of circulation. Attributing ancient literature to appropriate schools and original authors has been a long-discussed issue in Chinese cultural studies, and in recent times, scholars have embarked upon quantitative investigations in this regard (Zhu et al. 2021 ; Zhou et al. 2023 ). In this section, we provide quantitative suggestions for controversial literature based on its intertextual distributions among schools.

Appropriate school attribution could contribute to the study of the influence and evolution of cultural thought. For example, Lüshi Chunqiu , an encyclopedic classic from the Warring States Period, was compiled in 239 BC with the support of the politician Lü Buwei. It brought together doctrines from various schools. However, there is no conclusion about its predilection among them (e.g., Syncretism theory, Taoism theory, and Confucianism theory (Chen 2001 )).

In Fig. 5c , our quantitative modelling result shows that Lüshi Chunqiu is a syncretic work ( $T = 0.78\sim 1.43$ ) led by Taoism ( $T = 1.43$ , $P = 0.0004$ , $n = 6118$ , for Taoism). It indicates that the editors have done a syncretic compilation of the theories in that period, with a slight inclination toward Taoism.

The variation of intertextual distributions can also be applied to controversial authorship attribution. Some ancient books were published in the name of famous scholars, but the real authors maybe someone else. However, the creations by different people have their own styles. The thought divergence between the real celebrity and their impostor could be implied in the intertextual variation of their works.

For example, Tao Yuanming is widely recognized as a representative of Chinese individual liberalism (Swartz 2008 ). He refused to serve the government and pursued a pastoral life. His yearning for a free life was depicted in his poems, which is highly consistent with the claim of Taoism. He is considered to have a strong predilection for Taoism and was slightly affected by Confucianism. Therefore, it is puzzling to find that the Tendency Index shown in Fig. 5d indicates a significant predilection for Confucianism in the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming ( $T = 2.41$ , $P = 0.0007$ , $n = 2119$ , for Confucianism).

Further investigation revealed that the authorship of some parts of the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming is controversial. The version compiled by Xiao Tong (501–531) did not contain Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers , while the version of Yang Xiuzhi (509–582) added them. Yang Xiuzhi mentioned in the preface that Xiao Tong’s version was missing these two parts, so he added them to prevent them from being lost in future generations.

However, later scholars gradually became suspicious of these two parts. The most famous one is the assertion in Siku Quanshu (Ji 1997 ). For its “self-contradictory” and “meaningless”, Siku Quanshu declared that Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers were counterfeit. This view remains popular today, owing to the authority of Siku Quanshu .

To find clues to this dispute, we compared the intertextual distributions of the widely accepted and controversial parts. We divided the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming into two parts: collection 1 included Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers , while collection 2 contains the remaining works. The Tendency Index for the two collections is shown in Fig. 5d . The “Tao Yuanming” of collection 1 exhibited a significant preference for Confucianism ( $T = 3.02$ , $P = 0.0002$ , $n = 436$ , for Confucianism), while the “Tao Yuanming” of collection 2 inclined towards Taoism ( $T = 2.45$ , $P = 0.0658$ , $n=1683$ , for Taoism) and has an above-average preference for Confucianism ( $T = 1.51$ , $P = 0.1985$ , $n = 1683$ , for Confucianism). The modelling result of collection 2 is consistent with the actual behaviours and mainstream cognition of Tao Yuanming.

The Tendency Index shows an antithesis between the controversial sections and other parts in terms of their intertextual connections to Confucianism and Taoism. Considering the life experience of Tao Yuanming, our finding lends further support to the speculation: Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers were forged by others in the name of Tao Yuanming.

Nevertheless, it is also worth considering that these two books were intended as textbooks for family education. If we treat them as the original works of Tao Yuanming, the intertextual discrepancy in the results reveals the divergence between the personal pursuits of Tao Yuanming (Taoism) and his aim to educate future generations (Confucianism).

Study 2. Vicissitudes of schools

At the second level, we studied the rise and fall of schools in different eras and domains. Scholars have employed character co-occurrence (Yang and Song 2022 ), syntactic patterns (Lee et al. 2018 ), and topic analysis (Nichols et al. 2018 ) to quantitatively measure the grammatical and ideological connections in ancient Chinese literature, thus supporting research into cultural differences and thought evolution. In this section, we studied cultural phenomena through diachronic and field-specific intertextual distributions. We investigated quantitative evidence for the connections between historical events and school status. Besides, schools’ claims have their own focus, making them favoured by different aspects of culture. We quantitatively discussed the status of Confucianism and Taoism in various cultural domains.

To achieve this, we divided ancient China into 12 eras and built an era-text corpus from history books and anthologies. The era-text corpus is a comprehensive collection of literature from official and folk sources, allowing them to be taken as indicators of the prevailing thought of that time. The era-text was then classified into 12 eras and added to the intertextuality modelling. For a specific collection of text, its intertextual association with the era-text implies its popularity in that era. The Historical Status Index H was designed to measure the school status in each era. The schematic diagram of this index is shown in Fig. 4b , and the details of the calculation are as follows.

We first calculated the average intertextual score between the keystone works of each school and the era-text in each era. For each school, its index H is defined as the ratio of the average intertextual score in a specific era to its mean across all eras and schools. Let $S = \{ S_1,S_2 \ldots S_v\}$ denote the set of schools, and $E = \{ E_1,E_2 \ldots E_f\}$ denote the set of eras. For a given school S k and era E e , where school S k has l keystone works and era E e has c books in era-text, the Historical Status Index H ke is calculated as follows:

H ke reflects the status of school S k in the era E e . If its mean value $\bar H$ in era E e exceeds 1.00, it suggests that the school had an above-average influence in era E e . The Historical Status Index of five schools in 12 eras is shown in Fig. 6 .

The timeline gives the name of each era, with the approximate AD years of its beginning and end. The histogram shows the H of each school, while the line chart indicates its mean value in each era.

School transformation in history

As society changed, schools of thought experienced booms and declines in Chinese history. Historical events like wars, policies and regime changes have impacted the school’s evolution. In this section, we investigated the quantitative textual evidence of these connections through the diachronic changes in their intertextual distributions.

The results show that the keystone classics of these five schools were highly intertextual with era-text within about a thousand years ( $\bar H > 1$ ) and then gradually decreased ( $\bar H < 1$ ). Although the original texts created during the axial period were still classic, they gradually became unsuitable for the new era (Feng and Bodde 1948 ). This could be the reason for the decrease in the $\bar H$ index. Throughout the millennium of prosperity, we can observe the connections between school transformation and historical events.

The popularity of the school of Military was affected by the division of the country in the Three Kingdoms period (220–280), when China was divided into three comparable kingdoms. The country was in turmoil, and wars often broke out between these three kingdoms. Against this background, the school of Military, which was themed on the philosophy of war, reached its heyday ( $H = 3.15$ , for Military in the Three Kingdoms period).

The linkage between political events and the prosperity and decline of the school manifested in the quantitative results. Confucianism was a school of humanism (Juergensmeyer 2005 ), while Legalism was a school that advocated legal institutions. Some scholars believe that ancient China was influenced by both Confucianism and Legalism (Zhou 2011 ; Zhao 2015 ). In Qin (221 BC - 207 BC) and Han (202 BC - 220) Dynasties, favour from the government made two schools stand out rapidly. The Shang Yang Reform (356 BC & 350 BC) and the advocation from the emperor Qin Shi Huang brought Legalism to a peak in the Qin Dynasty ( $H = 3.67$ , for Legalism in the Qin Dynasty). However, this brief prosperity ended with the demise of the Qin Dynasty. The policy implemented in the Han Dynasty, which banned other philosophical schools and venerated Confucianism, caused the drop of $\bar H$ and made Confucianism ( $H = 1.73$ , for Confucianism in the Han Dynasty) exceed others ( $H = 0.94\sim 1.23$ , other schools in the Han Dynasty). This advantage continued since then, and Confucianism had long been the dominant philosophical school in ancient China.

School influence in various domains

Confucianism and Taoism were representative schools of collectivism and individualism in ancient China (Munro 1985 ). As the two most prominent native philosophical schools, Confucianism and Taoism have often been compared. In this section, we studied the influence of Confucianism and Taoism through their intertextual distributions among various cultural domains.

Confucianism placed greater emphasis on family and social relations, whereas Taoism focused more on nature and the spirit. For most of the time since the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220), Confucianism was far superior to other schools of thought. Nevertheless, there was an anomaly in history. As shown in Fig. 6 , Taoism experienced a revival from the Three Kingdoms period (220–280) to the Jin Dynasty (266–420). In the Jin Dynasty, the status of Confucianism ( $H = 2.14$ , for Confucianism in the Jin Dynasty) and Taoism ( $H = 2.10$ , for Taoism in the Jin Dynasty) was very close. It stemmed from the collapse of the Han Dynasty, which advocated Confucianism. During this period, people sought to find a successor from the theories of other schools (Feng and Bodde, 1948 ). In the background, Wei Jin metaphysics developed from Taoism theory. However, this prosperity did not last long. After the brief revival, Taoism decayed while Confucianism remained the mainstream.

In addition to the diachronic investigation, we discussed the status of Confucianism and Taoism in different cultural domains according to their intertextuality with texts on related topics. History books in ancient China tended to record political events. Therefore, we took the intertextual associations with history books to indicate the political status of a school. The average Tendency Index of history books is shown in Fig. 7a . We also test whether the Tendency Index of Confucianism exceeds Taoism significantly with a one-tailed paired samples t-test. The distribution of their difference value is shown in Fig. 7b , which corresponds to normal distribution. The significance level α is set to 0.05. Confucianism exceeded Taoism significantly in the political domain ( $P = 2.22e - 15$ , $n = 55$ ).

a The average Tendency Index of history books. b Difference value distribution of Tendency Index between Confucianism and Taoism among 55 history books. c The average Tendency Index of 125 classics from various cultural domains. d Difference value distribution of Tendency Index between Confucianism and Taoism among 125 classics. e Tendency Index of 125 classics towards Confucianism and Taoism, sorted by their difference value.

Although Taoism did not replace Confucianism in the political domain, it is comparable to Confucianism in broader cultural communities. We calculated the average Tendency Index of 125 classics from various cultural domains, and the result is shown in Fig. 7c . We test whether their Tendency Index is variant with a two-tailed paired samples t -test. The distribution of their difference value is shown in Fig. 7d , which corresponds to normal distribution. The significance level α is set to 0.05. There is no significant difference between Confucianism and Taoism among these classics ( $P = 0.8014$ , $n = 125$ , not rejecting the null hypothesis). Specifically, Fig. 7e shows the Tendency Index of 125 classics towards two schools. Among these classics, Confucianism and Taoism had respective advocacy groups. Books on politics and regulations are highly intertextual with Confucianism, while books on mythology, occultism, and medicine are close to Taoism.

These indicators show that Confucianism has advantages in the political field, while Taoism attempted to surpass Confucianism yet failed. However, Taoism was on par with Confucianism in other fields of ancient Chinese culture. Thus, it is suggested that in ancient China, the political domain was the territory of collectivism, while individualism flourished in the diverse cultural fields.

Study 3. Communication with foreign culture

At the third level, we investigated the communication between ancient China and foreign cultures, with a focus on Buddhism, one of the most influential foreign religions in ancient China. The preaching of Buddhism experienced imitation and integration (Zürcher 2007 ). We started by identifying the native schools that are most intertextual with Buddhism and then discussed the different stages of the infiltration between Buddhism and native Chinese culture.

Although the dissemination of information in ancient times was much slower than it is now, ancient China had extensive communication with foreign cultures. As a result, the cultural evolution of ancient China was not isolated. Buddhism, a religion that originated in ancient India, spread to ancient China during Han Dynasty. Buddhist scriptures were translated into Chinese versions, which were widely disseminated over the next millennia.

In this section, we investigated the preaching of Buddhism in ancient China through the intertextual association between Buddhist scriptures and native classics. We selected the four most influential Buddhist scriptures in ancient China ( Diamond Sutra , Lotus Sutra , Shurangama Sutra , and Avatamsaka Sutra ) as the keystone work of Buddhism and added them to the modelling. The diachronic changes of intertextual distributions reveal the evolution of cultural integration in different stages. The topics of intertextual associations show the commonalities between Buddhism and native culture.

Analogue in native cultural groups

As a newly introduced religion, Buddhism inevitably interacted with the existing native cultural groups in its preaching. Taoist religion, which developed from Taoist philosophy, was the dominant indigenous religion in China. Scholars generally believe that Buddhism and Taoism imitated each other in many ways (Mollier 2008 ), including textual scriptures, image symbols, and organization. In this study, we concentrate on textual scriptures. Figure 8a shows the Tendency Index of Buddhist scriptures towards the five native schools. Taoism is the closest native school as expected ( $T = 1.83$ , $P = 0.0131$ , $n = 62693$ , for Taoism).

Besides, we found that Buddhist scriptures borrowed language expressions from existing Chinese terms in the translations of Buddhist concepts. Figure 8b shows two cases from the detected intertextual sentences. The term “Amrita” (meaning “immortality drink”) was borrowed from the word “甘露“ (gan lu, meaning “sweet dew”) when translated into Chinese. This word refers to “rain” in the native Taoist classic Tao Te Ching . Similarly, the Chinese translation of “Sattva” (meaning “sentient beings”) employed the term “众生“ (zhong sheng, meaning “all living beings”), as found in the Taoist classic Zhuangzi .

Evolution of cultural integration

Apart from the philosophical schools, intercultural communication manifested in various aspects of society. Therefore, we expanded the horizons to broader cultural domains. In this section, we compared the intertextual associations between Buddhism and native literature before and after its introduction.

During the Jin Dynasty (266–420), these four Buddhist scriptures were translated into Chinese, paving the way for Buddhism to flourish in ancient China. After separating the texts before and after AD 420, we ranked native classics based on their intertextual scores with Buddhist scriptures. The top 10 classics are shown in Fig. 8c and e . We also juxtaposed Buddhism with five native schools and calculated the Tendency Index of these classics.

Before the introduction of Buddhism, its similar native classics often focused on myth and religion, implying that the Chinese version of Buddhist scriptures retained the original theme. Besides, it may attribute to their assimilation of the corresponding native literature in the Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures. Specifically, three similar cases from the top three classics are shown in Fig. 8d . The Chinese version of Buddhist scriptures shares similar phrases with native myths in their discussions of mysteries, including the control of ghosts and gods, and the description of the mysterious phenomenon of “burning day and night”. It also mimicked the language expression of native religious discourses. For example, the description of the choice between justice and evil is highly consistent between Cantongqi and Avatamsaka Sutra .

After the introduction of Buddhism, Buddhist doctrines diffused into various domains of native culture. Compared to the previous period, there was an overall increase in the Tendency Index of Buddhism among the top 10 classics. It indicates the promotion of Buddhism’s influence on Chinese culture. One notable change is the emergence of three native Buddhist works. It symbolizes that Buddhism built its advocacy group in ancient China. These works remoulded Buddhism in a new cultural environment with localized doctrines. In addition to expanding its own religious territory, Buddhism integrated into other native religions (Zürcher 1980 ). For example, the top 1 work shown in Fig. 8e is the native religious classic named Xuan Zhu Lu , which deeply absorbed Buddhist theories. In terms of missionary targets, the preaching of Buddhism was not limited to ordinary people and even reached the supreme ruler, such as the Emperor Wu of Liang (464–549), which ranks third in Fig. 8e . With the advocacy of the emperor, the Liang Dynasty was the heyday of Buddhism in the Southern Dynasty (Strange 2011 ). For details, Fig. 8f shows three similar cases from the top three native classics after the introduction of Buddhism. Religious concepts from Buddhism were mixed into Chinese as new words (e.g., ten directions, immeasurable and Buddha). India’s “Ganges River” flowed into ancient China along with Buddhist scriptures.

Online platform

In this paper, we focused on the theme of cultural evolution. However, there are many other meaningful findings in our modelling results, which await further explanation by relevant scholars. Therefore, we have developed an online platform ( http://evolution.pkudh.xyz/ ) featuring an interactive visualization system that displays the corpus and intertextual sentences. This platform shows millions of intertextual cases detected in this work and provides support for further data analysis. Even researchers without programming backgrounds can gain valuable insights into our work and develop further studies using this convenient tool. We gave several screenshots of the platform in Fig. 9 .

a Intertextual sentence browsing from corpus. b Intertextual sentence statistics and visualization within a custom collection. c Visualization of intertextual sentences distribution among different chapters of a book within a custom collection.

With the leap forward of big data and AI technology, computer-assisted cultural studies have expanded in both scale and depth. Intricate cultural problems can be discussed quantitatively with the support of large-scale data. In this paper, we used digital methods to quantify the cultural evolution of China over the past thousands of years within a large-scale corpus of ancient literature.

We gave validated results for several acknowledged cultural phenomena. The two evolutionary paths of Taoism and Confucianism, inspiring new branches of school and migrating to religious fields, were confirmed by intertextual associations. Besides, we provided quantitative evidence for the connections between the schools’ status and several historical events. It shows the intertwining of philosophical schools and politics in ancient China.

Through our analysis, we gained quantitative insights into some long-debated cultural problems. For literature with controversial school attribution, our findings suggest that Lüshi Chunqiu is a syncretic work headed by the theory of Taoism. As for literature with controversial authorship attribution, we revealed that Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers are divergent from other works of Tao Yuanming in ideological preference. In the comparison between Confucianism and Taoism, we propose that collectivism represented by Confucianism was mainstream in the political domain, while individualism represented by Taoism was active in extensive fields of ancient Chinese culture.

Furthermore, we investigated intercultural communication between Buddhism and Chinese native culture. The results suggest that the influence of this foreign culture evolved at different stages, from imitation to integration. In the early days, Buddhism imitated similar aspects of native culture to ease resistance (Kohn 1995 ). After the initial prosperity of Buddhism in China, it was remoulded through localized Buddhist works. As time went by, Buddhism became a part of the local culture. It was evident in various cultural domains of ancient China.

Our study demonstrates that hierarchical intertextuality modelling is a promising tool for cultural analysis within the large-scale corpus. However, there are still limitations in quantitative intertextuality research on Chinese literature. The evolution of language over time presents challenges in detecting intertextuality between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese is challenging. Besides, intercultural communication from different languages requires cross-lingual detection, which is still an area that remains underexplored.

This research represents an innovative attempt to study the evolution of Chinese culture from a digital perspective. It provides new insights into the interpretation of ancient Chinese culture and raises important questions for further exploration: How did ancient Chinese culture evolve into its modern form? What was the impact of global culture on this process of evolution? To conduct more comprehensive research, interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration is necessary.

Data availability

The open-sourced code, data catalogue and online platform can be found here: https://github.com/CissyDuan/Evol . The textual data can be downloaded from open websites: http://www.xueheng.net and http://www.daizhige.org/ . The pre-trained model is accessed from an open-sourced model: https://github.com/ethan-yt/guwenbert .

Alfaro MJM (1996) Intertextuality: origins and development of the concept. Atlantis 18:268–285. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41054827

Google Scholar

Alshaabi T, Adams JL, Arnold MV et al. (2021) Storywrangler: a massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter. Sci Adv 7(29):eabe6534. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe6534

Article ADS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Assael Y, Sommerschield T, Shillingford B et al. (2022) Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks. Nature 603(7900):280–283. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04448-z

Article ADS CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Ban G (1962) Book of Han. Zhonghua Book Company, Beijing

Bol PK (2008) Neo-Confucianism in history. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, MA

Burns PJ, Brofos JA, Li K, et al. (2021) Profiling of intertextuality in Latin literature using word embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (pp. 4900–4907). https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.389

Büchler M, Burns PR, Müller M, et al. (2014) Towards a historical text re-use detection. In Text Mining (pp. 221–238). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12655-5_11

Chen KKS (1964) Buddhism in China: a historical survey. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv131bw1p

Chen S (1989) Han Shi Waizhuan Shu Zheng. Shin Wen Feng Print Co., Taipei

Chen H (2001) Survey of research on lüshi chunqiu. J Chin Cult 2:64–72

ADS Google Scholar

Chen T, Kornblith S, Norouzi M, et al. (2020) A simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. In International conference on machine learning (pp. 1597–1607). PMLR. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/chen20j.html

Coffee N, Koenig JP, Poornima S et al. (2012a) The Tesserae Project: intertextual analysis of Latin poetry. Literary and linguistic computing 28(2):221–228. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqs033

Article Google Scholar

Coffee N, Koenig JP, Poornima S et al. (2012b) Intertextuality in the digital age. Transactions of the American Philological Association 1974:383–422. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23324457

Deng Z, Yang H, Wang J (2022) A Comparative Study of Shiji and Hanshu from the Perspective of Digital Humanities. In Proceedings of the 21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 656–670). https://aclanthology.org/2022.ccl-1.59

Devlin J, Chang M-W, Lee K et al. (2019) BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT (pp 4171–4186). https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423

Dexter JP, Katz T, Tripuraneni N et al. (2017) Quantitative criticism of literary relationships. Proc Natl Acad Sci 114(16):E3195–E3204. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1611910114

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Feng Y, Bodde D (1948) A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. Macmillan Inc., New York

Forstall CW, Jacobson SL, Scheirer WJ (2011) Evidence of intertextuality: investigating Paul the Deacon’s Angustae Vitae. Lit Linguist Comput 26(3):285–296. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqr029

Forstall C, Coffee N, Buck T et al. (2015) Modeling the scholars: detecting intertextuality through enhanced word-level n-gram matching. Digit Scholarsh Humanit 30(4):503–515. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu014

Ganascia J-G, Glaudes P, Del Lungo A (2014) Automatic detection of reuses and citations in literary texts. Lit Linguist Comput 29(3):412–421. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu020

Gao T, Yao X, Chen D (2021) SimCSE: simple contrastive learning of sentence embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 6894–6910). https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.552

Garg N, Schiebinger L, Jurafsky D et al. (2018) Word embeddings quantify 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes. Proc Natl Acad Sci 115(16):E3635–E3644. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1720347115

Gernet J (1996) A history of Chinese civilization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Giulianelli M, Del Tredici M, Fernández R (2020) Analysing lexical semantic change with contextualised word representations. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp 3960–3973). https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.365

Graham AC (1989) Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical argument in ancient China. Open Court, Chicago

Gray RD, Watts J (2017) Cultural macroevolution matters. Proc Natl Acad Sci 114(30):7846–7852. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1620746114

Hartberg YM, Wilson DS (2017) Sacred text as cultural genome: an inheritance mechanism and method for studying cultural evolution. Religion Brain Behav 7(3):178–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1195766

He Z, Zhu G, Fan S (2004) Parallel Passages from Pre-Han and Han Texts Series. The Chinese University Press, Hong Kong

Huang S, Zhou H, Peng Q et al. (2021) Automatic recognition and bibliometric analysis of cited books. J China Soc Sci Tech Inform 40(12):1325–1337. https://doi.org/10.3772/j.issn.1000-0135.2021.12.010

Ji Y (1997) Qin Ding Siku Quanshu Zongmu, Zhonghua Book Company, Beijing

Jockers ML (2013) Macroanalysis: Digital methods and literary history. University of Illinois Press, Urbana

Johnson J, Douze M, Jegou H (2019) Billion-scale similarity search with gpus. IEEE Trans Big Data 7(3):535–547. https://doi.org/10.1109/TBDATA.2019.2921572

Juergensmeyer M (2005) Religion in Global Civil Society. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Kingma DP, Ba J (2015) Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization. 3rd International Conference on Learning Representations. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1412.6980

Kohn L (1995) Laughing at the Tao: Debates among Buddhists and Taoists in Medieval China. Princeton University Press, Princeton

Kozlowski AC, Taddy M, Evans JA (2019) The geometry of culture: analyzing the meanings of class through word embeddings. Am Sociol Rev 84(5):905–949. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419877135

Kristeva J (1980) Word, dialogue, and novel. In Leon S. Roudiez, editor, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, pp. 64–91. Columbia University Press, New York

Lansdall-Welfare T, Sudhahar S, Thompson J et al. (2017) Content analysis of 150 years of British periodicals. Proc Natl Acad Sci 114(4):E457–E465. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1606380114

Lee JS (2007) A computational model of text reuse in ancient literary texts. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (pp 472–479). https://aclanthology.org/P07-1060

Lee J, Kong YH, Luo M (2018) Syntactic patterns in classical Chinese poems: a quantitative study. Digit Scholarsh Humanit 33(1):82–95. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw059

Legge J (1861) Confucian analects: the great learning, and the doctrine of the mean. Courier Corporation. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4094

Lewens T (2015) Cultural evolution: conceptual challenges. OUP, Oxford

Book Google Scholar

Li W, Shao Y, Bi M (2022) Data construction and matching method for the task of ancient classics reference detection. In Proceedings of the 21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp 600–610). https://aclanthology.org/2022.ccl-1.54

Liang Y, Wang D, Huang S (2021) Research on automatic mining of variants expressing the same event in the ancient books. Library Inform Service 65(09):97–104. https://doi.org/10.13266/j.issn.0252-3116.2021.09.011

Liu Y, Ott M, Goyal N et al. (2019) Roberta: A robustly optimized bert pretraining approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11692. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1907.11692

Mesoudi A (2017) Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: prospects for a science of cultural evolution. Proc Natl Acad Sci 114(30):7853–7860. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1620741114

Michel JB, Shen YK, Aiden AP et al. (2011) Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science 331(6014):176–182. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644

Article ADS CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Mollier C (2008) Buddhism and Taoism face to face. In Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face. University of Hawaii Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824861698

Moritz M, Wiederhold A, Pavlek B et al. (2016) Non-literal text reuse in historical texts: an approach to identify reuse transformations and its application to bible reuse. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing pp 1849–1859. https://aclanthology.org/D16-1190

Munro DJ (1985) Individualism and holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist values. Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Neidorf L, Krieger MS, Yakubek M et al. (2019) Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition. Nat Hum Behav 3(6):560–567. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0570-1

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Newberry MG, Plotkin JB (2022) Measuring frequency-dependent selection in culture. Nat Hum Behav, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01342-6

Newberry MG, Ahern CA, Clark R et al. (2017) Detecting evolutionary forces in language change. Nature 551(7679):223–226. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24455

Nichols R, Slingerland E, Nielbo K et al. (2018) Modeling the contested relationship between Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi: Preliminary evidence from a machine-learning approach. J Asian Stud 77(1):19–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911817000973

Raz G (2012) The Emergence of Daoism: Creation of Tradition. Routledge, Milton Park

Resler A, Yeshurun R, Natalio F et al. (2021) A deep-learning model for predictive archaeology and archaeological community detection. Humanit Social Sci Commun 8(1):1–10. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00970-z

Riffaterre M (1994) Intertextuality vs. hypertextuality. New Literary History 25(4):779–788. https://doi.org/10.2307/469373

Rockmore DN, Fang C, Foti NJ et al. (2018) The cultural evolution of national constitutions. J Assoc Inform Sci Technol 69(3):483–494. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23971

Romanello M (2016) Exploring citation networks to study intertextuality in classics. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10(2). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/2/000255/000255.html

Scheirer W, Forstall C, Coffee N (2016) The sense of a connection: automatic tracing of intertextuality by meaning. Digit Scholarsh Humanit 31(1):204–217. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu058

Schwartz BI (1985) The world of thought in ancient China. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Sima Q (1959) Records of the Grand Historian, Zhonghua Book Company, Beijing

Strange M (2011) Representations of Liang Emperor Wu as a Buddhist Ruler in Sixth-and Seventh-century Texts. Asia Major, THIRD SERIES, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2011), pp. 53–112. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41650011

Sturgeon D (2018a) Digital approaches to text reuse in the early Chinese corpus. J Chin Lit Culture 5(2):186–213. https://doi.org/10.1215/23290048-7256963

Sturgeon D (2018b) Unsupervised identification of text reuse in early Chinese literature. Digit Scholarsh Humanit 33(3):670–684. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqx024

Swartz W (2008) Reading Tao Yuanming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1x07x16

Tamariz M (2019) Replication and emergence in cultural transmission. Phys Life Rev 30:47–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2019.04.004

Article ADS PubMed Google Scholar

Vaswani A, Shazeer N, Parmar N et al. (2017) Attention is all you need. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf

Yang Y, Song Y (2022) Exploring the similarity between Han’s and non-Han’s Yuan poetry: resistance distance metrics over character co-occurrence networks. Digit Scholarsh Humanit 37(3):880–893. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab082

Yao X (2000) An introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511800887

Yu K, Shao Y, Li W (2022) Research on Sentence Alignment of Ancient and Modern Chinese based on Reinforcement Learning). In Proceedings of the 21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 704–715). https://aclanthology.org/2022.ccl-1.63

Zhao D (2015) The Confucian-legalist state: a new theory of Chinese history. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199351732.001.0001

Zhou H (2011) Confucianism and the Legalism: a model of the national strategy of governance in ancient China. Front Econ China 6(4):616–637. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11459-011-0150-4

Zhou H, Jiang Y, Wang L (2023) Are Daojing and Dejing stylistically independent of each other: a stylometric analysis with activity and descriptivity. Digit Scholarsh Humanit 38(1):434–450. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac042

Zhu H, Lei L, Craig H (2021) Prose, verse and authorship in dream of the red chamber: a stylometric analysis. J Quant Linguist 28(4):289–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2020.1724677

Zürcher E (1980) Buddhist influence on early Taoism. T’oung Pao 66(1):84–147. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853280X00039

Zürcher E (2007) The Buddhist conquest of China: the spread and adaptation of Buddhism in early medieval China. Brill, Leiden

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the NSFC project ‘the Construction of the Knowledge Graph for the History of Chinese Confucianism’ (Grant No. 72010107003).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Information Management, Peking University, Beijing, China

Siyu Duan & Jun Wang

Center for Digital Humanities, Peking University, Beijing, China

Siyu Duan, Jun Wang, Hao Yang & Qi Su

Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing, China

Jun Wang, Hao Yang & Qi Su

School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, Beijing, China

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

SD wrote code and paper, conducted experiments and data analysis, and designed the online platform. JW initiated this research, proposed research questions and technical paths, and revised the paper. HY collected and processed the data and revised the paper from a humanities perspective. QS directed this work, including technical innovation, cultural analysis and paper writing. All authors approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qi Su .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

Informed consent

Additional information.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Duan, S., Wang, J., Yang, H. et al. Disentangling the cultural evolution of ancient China: a digital humanities perspective. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 310 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01811-x

Download citation

Received : 08 December 2022

Accepted : 30 May 2023

Published : 09 June 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01811-x

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

Explore articles by subject
Guide to authors
Editorial policies

REVIEW & ANALYSIS

Political science, journalism and communication, linguistics, international studies, interdisciplinary studies, book review, publications, social sciences in china (chinese), social sciences in china, journal of aesthetics, chinese social science digest, international social science journal, china social science review, chinese journal of literary criticism, organization, sscp in the news, sscp publications, scholars deepen overseas chinese literature research.

The Chinese American writer Geling Yan and her novel You Touched Me Photo: CFP

Boston University Libraries

Chinese Language & Literature

About this guide, featured resources.

Dictionaries
Language Learning
Language History / Linguistics
Chinese Literature
Tips for Finding Books and Articles
Citing Your Sources
Additional Resources
Chinese Literature @ BU

New Books - Recent Acquisitions

Language resources - dictionaries and grammar books
Background information - guides, encyclopedias, biographies
Open Access resources including websites and digital collections
Chinese related programs at Boston University

Related Guides

Chinese Art, Architecture, & Archaeology by BU Libraries Last Updated Aug 1, 2023 3 views this year
AN505: Women and Social Change in Asia (Spring 2023) by BU Libraries Last Updated Aug 1, 2023 9 views this year
Asian Studies: Online Resources at Boston University by Barbara Maratos Last Updated Mar 7, 2024 19 views this year
Literature by Barbara Maratos Last Updated Dec 11, 2023 124 views this year
Linguistics by Barbara Maratos Last Updated Nov 9, 2023 40 views this year
Translation Studies by Barbara Maratos Last Updated Oct 20, 2023 24 views this year
Next: Dictionaries >>
Last Updated: Dec 11, 2023 2:21 PM
URL: https://library.bu.edu/chinese

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

This Just In
Grateful Dead
Old Time Radio
78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
Audio Books & Poetry
Computers, Technology and Science
Music, Arts & Culture
News & Public Affairs
Spirituality & Religion
Radio News Archive

Flickr Commons
Occupy Wall Street Flickr
NASA Images
Solar System Collection
Ames Research Center

All Software
Old School Emulation
MS-DOS Games
Historical Software
Classic PC Games
Software Library
Kodi Archive and Support File
Vintage Software
CD-ROM Software
CD-ROM Software Library
Software Sites
Tucows Software Library
Shareware CD-ROMs
Software Capsules Compilation
CD-ROM Images
ZX Spectrum
DOOM Level CD

Smithsonian Libraries
FEDLINK (US)
Lincoln Collection
American Libraries
Canadian Libraries
Universal Library
Project Gutenberg
Children's Library
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Books by Language
Additional Collections

Prelinger Archives
Democracy Now!
Occupy Wall Street
TV NSA Clip Library
Animation & Cartoons
Arts & Music
Computers & Technology
Cultural & Academic Films
Ephemeral Films
Sports Videos
Videogame Videos
Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

Wayback Machine (iOS)
Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

Explore the Collections
Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Topics in Chinese literature; outlines and bibliographies

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

Graphic Violence
Explicit Sexual Content
Hate Speech
Misinformation/Disinformation
Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

13 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by Unknown on March 6, 2012

Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Chinese literature Women in literature'

Create a spot-on reference in apa, mla, chicago, harvard, and other styles.

Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Chinese literature Women in literature.'

Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.

You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.

Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.

Liu, Wen. "Representation of women and dramatization of ideology in modern Chinese literature /." view abstract or download file of text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3102175.

Wang, Jing. "Strategies of Modern Chinese Women Writers' Autobiography." The Ohio State University, 2000. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392046947.

Huang, Xincun. "Written in the ruins war and domesticity in Shanghai literature of the 1940s /." online access from Digital dissertation consortium, 1998. http://libweb.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/er/db/ddcdiss.pl?9906138.

Yu, Siu-hung, and 余小紅. "Representations of Chinese women in three modern literary texts." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31988271.

Vickery, Eileen Frances. "Disease and the dilemmas of identity : representations of women in modern Chinese literature /." view abstract or download file of text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3120629.

Shen, Ruihua. "New woman, new fiction : autobiographical fictions by twentieth-century Chinese women writers /." view abstract or download file of text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3113028.

Yu, Siu-hung. "Representations of Chinese women in three modern literary texts." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2005. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B31988271.

李仕芬 and Shi-fan Lee. "The male characters in the fiction of contemporary Taiwanese women writers." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1997. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31235979.

Chen, Yuling, and 陳玉玲. "A study of subjectivity in the autobiography of modern Chinese women =." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1996. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B44569713.

Ng, Po-chu. "Writing about women and women's writing a study of Hong Kong feminine fiction in 80s and 90s = Shu xie nü xing yu nü xing shu xie : ba, jiu shi nian dai xiang gang nü xing xiao shuo yan jiu /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2006. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36259019.

Mou, Sherry Jenq-yunn. "Gentlemen's prescriptions for women's lives: Liu Hsiang's The Biographies of Women and its influence on the Biographies of Women chapters in early Chinese dynastic histories /." The Ohio State University, 1994. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487857546388369.

Ng, Yor-ling Carly, and 吳若寧. "Representing Chineseness: the problem of ethnicity and sexuality in Chinese American female literature." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2011. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B47753158.

Wang, Bo. "Inventing a Discourse of Resistance: Rhetorical Women in Early Twentieth-Century China." Diss., Tucson, Arizona : University of Arizona, 2005. http://etd.library.arizona.edu/etd/GetFileServlet?file=file:///data1/pdf/etd/azu%5Fetd%5F1188%5F1%5Fm.pdf&type=application/pdf.

Yan, Qigang. "A comparative study of contemporary Canadian and Chinese women writers." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq21657.pdf.

Hsieh, Hsin-Chin. "Life on the Move: Women's Migration and Re/making Home in Contemporary Chinese and Sinophone Literature and Film." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/19322.

Le, Nga. "Women in Zhang Ailing's short stories : an insight into her vision of life and place in Chinese literature." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/28416.

Chang, Mei-tsu, and 張美足. "A study of the prose-writings of contemporary women writers in Taiwan (1980-2000) =." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B45014668.

Chan, Suet Ni. "Women at crossroads : a study of women's search for identity in twentieth century Chinese-American fiction." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2009. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1095.

Bai, Di. "A feminist brave new world : the cultural revolution model theater revisited." Connect to resource, 1997. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1129217899.

Zhu, Fan, and 朱凡. "The earthly world and the red chambers : Qing women's self-representation and mediations with traditions in their writings on the Dream of the red chamber." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/195974.

Ng, Po-chu, and 伍寶珠. "Writing about women and women's writing." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2006. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B36259019.

齊曉楓 and Hsiao-feng Chi. "Patterns of husband selection in traditional Chinese fiction and drama." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1998. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31238312.

Chin, Voon-sheong Grace, and 秦煥嫦. "Expressions of self/censorship: ambivalence and difference in Chinese women's prose writings from Malaysia andSingapore." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2004. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31245237.

Lui, Hoi Ling. "Gender, emotions, and texts : writings to and about husbands in anthologies of Qing women's works." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2010. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1201.

Costa, Marília Borges. "Fios diaspóricos nas narrativas de "The woman warrior", de Maxine Hong Kingston." Universidade de São Paulo, 2003. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8147/tde-09042003-174326/.

Wang, Jianhui. "Sexual politics in the works of Chinese American women writers Sui Sin Far, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan /." Open access to IUP's electronic theses and dissertations, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2069/51.

Jiang, Yun. "The Making of the Ephemeral Beauty: Acceptance and Rejection of Patriarchal Constructions of Hongyan Boming in Late-Ming Texts." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/24177.

馬穎雯 and Wing-man Marina Ma. "The plural subject in The woman warrior: "Pangs of Love" and "Phoenix Eyes"." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2004. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31627614.

Lingenfelter, Andrea Diane. "A marked category : nine women of modern Chinese poetry, 1920-1997 /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/11129.

Chan, Kar Yue. "Ambivalence in poetry : Zhu Shuzhen of the Song Dynasty." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/28704.

David, Elise J. "Making Visible Feminine Modernities: The Traditionalist Paintings and Modern Methods of Wu Shujuan." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1338316520.

Lo, Keng-chi, and 盧勁馳. "Politicizing female subjectivity: performativity and sublimation in leftist writers Yang Mo, Xiao Hong." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2012. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B48199503.

Pu, Xiumei. "Spirituality a womanist reading of Amy Tan's "The bonesetter's daughter" /." unrestricted, 2006. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-07192006-191437/.

Isbister, Dong. "The “Sent-Down Body” Remembers: Contemporary Chinese Immigrant Women’s Visual and Literary Narratives." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1259594428.

Liu, Wenjia 1981. "The tanci "Feng shuangfei": A female perspective on the gender and sexual politics of late-Qing China." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11140.

Ma, Wing-man Marina. "The plural subject in The woman warrior "Pangs of Love" and "Phoenix Eyes" /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2004. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B31627614.

Shultz, Rebekah Elizabeth. "The role of Taoism in the social construction of identity in The Joy Luck Club." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2002. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2060.

Xu, Sufeng. "Lotus flowers rising from the dark mud : late Ming courtesans and their poetry." Thesis, McGill University, 2007. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102831.

Gao, Xiongya. "Images of Chinese women in Pearl S. Buck's novels : a study of characterization in East wind, west wind, Pavilion of woman, Peony, The good earth, and The mother." Virtual Press, 1993. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/862280.

Qiao, Yiyuanfang. "“A FRIEND FROM FAR AWAY”: BERTOLT BRECHT AND HIS CHINESE-INFLUENCED WORKS." VCU Scholars Compass, 2016. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4162.

Thunberg, Joanna. "How Femininity in Chinese and American Culture Confused and Established the Narrator's Identity in The Woman Warrior." Thesis, Högskolan Kristianstad, Fakulteten för lärarutbildning, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hkr:diva-19572.

黃嫣梨. "兩漢主要女文學作家研究." Thesis, University of Macau, 1986. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b1636204.

張曈. "論二十世紀九十年代女性私人化寫作 = The privatization of female 'personal' writings in the 1990s." Thesis, University of Macau, 2007. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b1636983.

李一之. "門裡門外性別之思 : 澳門初中語文教科書中的女性形象分析." Thesis, University of Macau, 2010. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2178397.

Hay, Jody L. "Native American women in children's literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/291972.

Oxendine, Jessica Grace. "Warrior Women in Early Modern Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2013. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc271872/.

Castro, Lingl Vera. "Assertive women in medieval Spanish literature." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.704745.

Ha, Jingjun. "Remapping Chinese literature digitizing contemporary Chinese writers, 1949-1999 /." online access from Digital Dissertation Consortium, 2006. http://libweb.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/er/db/ddcdiss.pl?MR22155.

Romanczuk, Barbara L. "Screening Zola's women /." The Ohio State University, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1486402544590054.

Hurwitz, Melissa. "Dispossessed Women| Female Homelessness in Romantic Literature." Thesis, Fordham University, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10281988.

“Dispossessed Women” examines the status of homeless women in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature, with special attention to both the cultural assumptions and aesthetic power that accrued to these figures. Across the Romantic era, vagrant women were ubiquitous not only in poetry, children’s fiction, novels, and non-fiction, but also on the streets of towns and cities as their population outnumbered that of vagrant males. Homeless women became the focus of debates over how to overhaul the nation’s Poor Laws, how to police the unhoused, and what the rising middle class owed the destitute in a rapidly industrializing Britain. Writers in the Romantic period began to treat these characters with increasing realism, rather than sentimentalism or satire. This dissertation tracks this understudied story through the writing of Mary Robinson, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Robert Southey, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

Text: A A A Print Culture

Chinese online literature starts new chapter overseas

After more than two decades of development, Chinese online literature has not only become one of the pillar resources of the pop culture market in China, but it is also an important way for people from different cultures to learn about each other, and communicate in the comment sections.

According to a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the overseas market value of Chinese online literature has surpassed 4 billion yuan ($554.59 million). By the end of 2023, about 410,000 overseas writers created around 620,000 original works on the international platforms of Chinese online literature, which attracted 230 million readers from more than 200 countries and regions. Readers from the United States made up the biggest proportion.

For years, Chinese online literary works were translated by fans and published on websites like Wuxiaworld, but these translations progressed too slowly, so some eager readers had to use translation tools. In 2017, to provide a solution to the translation of literature, Funstory.ai was founded. To date, the company has helped to translate more than 7,000 online novels with artificial intelligence.

At the end of 2019, Webnovel, the international platform of the China Literature Group, one of the leading online literature providers in the country, started posting online novels translated by AI and launched a function that allows readers to revise translations, which can help to upgrade AI.

With AI, Chinese online literary works and their adaptations can enter the international market more quickly and at a lower cost.

As quoted in the report, Tong Ye, chief executive officer of Funstory.ai, says that AI can make translation 3,600 times more efficient, and cut down cost by 99 percent.

At the China Literature Group, translation speed has dramatically increased from more than 10 chapters per day to hundreds of chapters per day, and costs have dropped by 90 percent. AI can translate online novels into languages including English, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese, German, French, Japanese and Chinese.

Since 2023, Webnovel has been advancing its translation mode — cooperation between humans and the machine. In this mode, the translations of Suming Zhihuan (Circle of Inevitability), which was first released in Chinese in March 2023, have become the second-most-read work from China. The English translation of Spanish online novel The Duke's Masked Wife has also become popular.

"Currently, the translation quality of online literature is not even, especially when target languages are minority languages," says Wu Yiqin, a member of the National Committee of the 14th Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and vice-president of China Writers Association. "Due to a lack of minority language data, AI can't translate very accurately and the quality can't be guaranteed."

At this year's two sessions, he submitted a proposal about ways to further promote the healthy development of Chinese online literature industry in the global markets.

The solution he proposed is to promote cooperation between academic institutions and companies in the research and development of AI translation technology, with political and financial support from the government.

Meanwhile, it is also important to accelerate resource integration and the building of a unified standard to enhance the multilingual capacity of AI to guarantee language style, cultural connotations and localization to improve the general quality, he says.

Apart from translations, adaptations of Chinese online novels are also attracting more people overseas.

For example, the second season of Joy of Life, adapted from an online novel and one of the most eagerly anticipated TV dramas on Tencent Video this year, will be distributed exclusively by Disney in overseas markets.

A video game adapted from the popular online novel Battle Through the Heavens saw quarter-on-quarter user growth of 118 percent in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand in the fourth quarter last year.

The lucrative potential of Chinese online literary intellectual property leads to copyright infringement problems overseas.

As a result, another big challenge for the international development of the Chinese online literature industry involves the protection of intellectual property.

Currently, copyright infringement issues are frequent in overseas markets, causing significant losses to creators and Chinese online content providers overseas, Wu writes in the proposal.

"Cross-border copyright transactions are difficult to prove, and it's challenging to monitor infringing content. Some foreign publishers are private and not under government control, making it very difficult to protect rights," he says.

In addition, some countries have not yet reached a consensus on intellectual property protection, and there are no agreements for mutual recognition and enforcement in judicial jurisdictions, resulting in significant costs and pressure for Chinese companies to protect their rights overseas.

Wu suggests that regulatory authorities and industry associations should fully utilize their guiding and coordinating roles to improve cross-border copyright protection mechanisms.

Regulatory authorities can promote exchange and cooperation in the cultural industry with other countries through official channels, sign bilateral or multilateral copyright protection agreements, and strengthen international copyright protection for the Chinese online literature industry, he says.

"Industry associations can also establish a unified information sharing platform to collect and analyze international copyright infringement cases, alert member units to pay attention to prevention, and provide professional copyright protection services when necessary," he says.

Related news

Online literature industry continues to grow

Online literature works read overseas, revealing power of Chinese creativity

Serfs' Emancipation Day celebrated in Xizang

Appearance of Chinese emperor from 1,500 years ago revealed

Magnificent scenery of Qiantang River tidal bore in Zhejiang

Marine authorities conduct joint patrol mission in waters of Taiwan Strait

2024 New York International Auto Show kicks off

Xi meets U.S. guests

Culture Fact: Things you must know about Nauru

China sends Yunhai-3 02 satellite into space

Tea picking robot operates in harvest season

Baltimore bridge taken down by cargo ship

Ancient city adorned with blooming cherry blossoms

In Numbers: China and Dominica celebrate 20 years of diplomatic ties

Media center of Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2024 opens

30 Buddhist relics donated to Chinese Mainland

Electromagnetic storms spur auroras in 'China's cold pole'

China Development Forum 2024 opens in Beijing

2 mln private vehicles pass through Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge

Russia mourns victims of deadly terrorist attack

Blooming cole flowers create water-painting scene in Sichuan

China's space environment monitoring satellites sent into space

China's first self-developed hydrogen-powered urban train completes test run

Zigzag Panlong road reopens to traffic after seasonal hibernation

Salt lake in Shandong resembles giant palette

Gaolangang Bridge of Huangmaohai cross-sea passage connected in S China

China dispatches aircraft to combat forest fire in Yunnan

Pink subway trains run to spring

A timeline of major Boeing aircraft accidents

China launches relay satellite Queqiao 2

China first zero-carbon data center reduce annual carbon emissions by more than 300,000 tons

Cherry blossoms in Wuhan University enter best viewing season

HKSAR LegCo unanimously passes national security bill

4th China Cross-border E-commerce Trade Fair kicks off in Fujian

Sama Festival celebrated in Guizhou

600-year-old magnolia tree blossoms in Sichuan

Three snow leopards captured by camera in Qinghai

China ready to launch relay satellite Queqiao 2

Insights | High-level exchanges send positive signals for Australia-China relations: Australian scholar

Six Chinese sites named UNESCO Global Geoparks

University Libraries

Contact a Librarian
Databases A-Z
Guides by Subject
Resources by Type
Find Books & Articles
Government Information
Iowa Digital Library
Iowa Research Online
Special Collections & University Archives
Iowa Women's Archives
Course Reserves
Office Delivery
Borrowing From Another Library & Document Delivery
Undergraduate Research Services (The SEAM)
Research Consultations
Instructional Services
Research Data Services
Open Educational Resources
Distance Education
Scholarly Publishing & Copyright
More services...
Check My Account
Renew My Books
My Interlibrary Loan
Recommend Library Purchase
EndNote Basic
Departments
Collection Management
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Publications, Plans & Reports
Make a Gift
History of the Library
For the Media
Research Guides & Tutorials
Directions & Maps
Assistance for Users with Disabilities
All Campus Libraries
Learning Commons
Main Library Gallery
Art Library
Business Library
Engineering Library
Health Sciences Library
Law Library
Music Library
Sciences Library
Contact a Librarian or the UI Libraries
Staff directory by name
Staff directory by organizational unit
Campus Libraries

ENGL:1200:0024 The Interpretation of Literature - Barringer, Spring 2024: Research Topics

Research Topics
Annotated Bibliography
Citing Your Research

Bravery and Ego

Suggested Search Terms:

courage in literature
Heroism & heroes
pride in literature
virtues in literature
heroes in literature
literature AND ego
you can also add the author or work to these, like courage in literature AND Shakespeare

Suggested Databases:

Homosexuality and male friendship in the 12th Century

homosexuality -- twelfth century
homosexuality, male -- history
homosexuality -- Europe -- history -- to 1500
male homosexuality
homosexuality in literature -- twelfth century
friendship -- twelfth century
social history, Medieval, 500-1500
medieval literature AND friendship
friendship in literature
friendship -- history

Psychological Development in One's Character

socialization -- history
socialization in literature
emotions in literature
socialization -- methods
moral development in literature
ethics -- psychological aspects
psychosocial development
social-cognitive development
psychological emotional development AND data AND children
<< Previous: Research
Next: Annotated Bibliography >>
Last Updated: Apr 1, 2024 2:54 PM
URL: https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/engl1200barringer

IMAGES

Chinese Literature by Yao Dan
Contemporary Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Post-Mao Fiction and
Duke University Press
A Guide to Chinese Literature
PPT
(PDF) Review of Literature on International Chinese Students

VIDEO

trending topics Chinese #shorts
3 Feb 2024 Executive Session
Chinese Literature
Literature Review
Medlock Chinese Language Builder Entertainment 3
Rethinking Chinese literature education

COMMENTS

Chinese literature
lüshi. yuefu. nanxi. Chinese literature, the body of works written in Chinese, including lyric poetry, historical and didactic writing, drama, and various forms of fiction. Chinese literature is one of the major literary heritages of the world, with an uninterrupted history of more than 3,000 years, dating back at least to the 14th century bce.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
Indexing. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) is a peer-reviewed journal for research on literature and other cultural topics, including film, drama, art, dance, performance, architecture, media history, print culture, and regional trends. The journal naturally covers mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, but it is not confined by ...
Chinese Masters Theses Collection
The Foundations of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language: An Investigation of Late 19th Century Textbooks, Lena Pearson, Chinese. PDF. The plural forms of personal pronouns in Modern Chinese, Baoying Qiu, Chinese. PDF. A Translation of Qiu Miaojin's "The Crocodile Diaries", Alexandra Valencik, Chinese. PDF
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR)
Established in 1978 (first issue in 1979), Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) remains today the only Western-language journal devoted to Chinese literature.CLEAR is published annually with support from the University of Wisconsin. Each issue contains five-seven essays and articles on various aspects of traditional and modern literature and about the same number of detailed ...
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures
Divided into three parts, on "structure," "taxonomy," and "methodology," this volume contains 46 original articles that examine unfamiliar texts and literary phenomena and offer new perspectives on more familiar ones. Keywords: Literature, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, dialect, minority language, critical theory, taxonomy, modernity.
Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
About the Journal. The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture publishes research articles and essays on premodern Chinese literature and all aspects of the broader literary culture. It also publishes work that explores the influence of traditional literature and culture in modern and contemporary China. For some periods of the twentieth ...
The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature
Xiaofei Tian is Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of A Dusty Table (University of Washington Press), Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502-557) (Harvard Asia Center), and Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-century China (Harvard Asia ...
Chinese Literature Today
The mission of Chinese Literature and Thought Today ( CLTT) is to provide the finest English translations of and fresh critical essays about contemporary Chinese literature, culture, philosophy, and intellectual history.CLTT grants the English-speaking world direct access to the latest developments and top-notch research in contemporary Chinese culture and offers readers exclusive coverage of ...
A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature review
Fan Boqun's 范伯群 History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature is a comprehensive and sometimes quirky contribution to the study of a vast corpus of writing that has been overshadowed by literature associated with the May Fourth tradition.Originally published in 2006 as Zhongguo xiandai tongsu wenxue shi (中国现代通俗文学史), and now translated into English thanks to the ...
PDF THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CLASSICAL CHINESE LITERATURE
the Universr旷sobjective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University ... Subjec臼：LCSH:Chinese literature-221 B.C.-960 A.D.-History and criticism. Classi直cation:LCC PL2283 .094 2017 I DDC 895.109/002-dc23 LC record available at h忧ps://lccn.loc.gov ...
Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction
Abstract. Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction tells the story of Chinese literature from antiquity to the present, focusing on the key role literary culture played in supporting social and political concerns. Embracing traditional Chinese understandings of literature as encompassing history and philosophy as well as poetry and poetics, storytelling, drama, and the novel, this VSI ...
Background Readings
This Very Short Introduction tells the story of Chinese literature from antiquity tothe present, focusing on the key role literary culture played in supporting social and political concerns. ... and recent Internet literature, among other topics. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for ...
Chinese Literature: An Introduction
Chinese Literature: An Introduction. Chinese literature is a pleasure to teach and to read; it holds an importance and relevance both in historical terms and in understanding the world today. Yet, its history, language and culture are quite rich, and different from much of the Western tradition that the study of Chinese literature can prove ...
The Concept of Literature of the Republic of China in Chinese Modern
The period division in the Chinese literary history directly copied the pattern of the social political history. Taking the recent time of literary history as example, more than half a century from the Opium War (1840) to the Reform Movement (1898), it seems that there wasn't any great achievement in the literature, nor any remarkable change according to that type of history.
Research Guides: Research Guide for Chinese Studies: Home
People's Republic of China Legal Research. Republic of China (Taiwan) Legal Research. Research Guide for East Asian Studies. Research Guide for Japanese Studies. Research Guide for Korean Studies. Streaming Video Resources at Harvard.
Disentangling the cultural evolution of ancient China: a digital
Topic modelling lends a hand to passage-level modelling (Scheirer et al. 2016), ... However, there are still limitations in quantitative intertextuality research on Chinese literature. The ...
Literary translation research in China
Literary translation. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Western powers exerted a great influence in China. Consequently, Chinese intellectuals embraced Western cultures, leading to the translation of classic works from languages such as English (e.g., Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield), French (La Dame aux camélias) and Spanish (Don Quijote) (Luo & Lei, Citation 2004, p. 22).
Scholars deepen overseas Chinese literature research-CSST
The overseas Chinese literature research trend is demonstrated by the combination of case studies and theoretical exploration, and by reflections on disciplinary history, said Liu Jun, a professor from the School of Liberal Arts at Nanjing University. Overseas Chinese literature offers many hot topics for research.
Research Postgraduate
Fung Chi Wang's main research areas include literature and thought during the Tang and Song Dynasty as well as Chinese culture and religion.He specializes in the research method of combining internal and external factors of literature, for example the study of the relationship between Confucianism and literature, the analysis of etiquette and the concept of ghost.
11411 PDFs
Explore the latest full-text research PDFs, articles, conference papers, preprints and more on CHINESE CULTURE. Find methods information, sources, references or conduct a literature review on ...
Home
Bandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel by Scott W. Gregory Bandits in Print examines the world of print in early modern China, focusing on the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan). Depending on which edition a reader happened upon, The Water Margin could offer vastly different experiences, a characteristic of the early modern Chinese novel ...
Topics in Chinese literature; outlines and bibliographies
ix, 141 p. 26 cm. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-03-06 18:23:34 Bookplateleaf 0010
Dissertations / Theses: 'Chinese literature Women in ...
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Chinese literature Women in literature.'. Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA ...
Chinese online literature starts new chapter overseas
According to a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the overseas market value of Chinese online literature has surpassed 4 billion yuan ($554.59 million). By the end of 2023 ...
Research Topics
Research Topics; Search this Guide Search. ENGL:1200:0024 The Interpretation of Literature - Barringer, Spring 2024: Research Topics. Home; Research Toggle Dropdown. Research Topics ; Annotated Bibliography; Citing Your Research; Bravery and Ego. Suggested Search Terms: courage in literature; courage;

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Chinese Masters Theses Collection

Theses from 2022 2022

Theses from 2021 2021

Theses from 2020 2020

Theses from 2019 2019

Theses from 2018 2018

Theses from 2017 2017

Theses from 2016 2016

Theses from 2015 2015

Theses from 2014 2014

Theses from 2013 2013

Theses from 2012 2012

Theses from 2011 2011

Theses from 2010 2010

Theses from 2009 2009

Theses from 2008 2008

Theses from 2007 2007

Theses from 2006 2006

Theses from 2005 2005

Theses from 2004 2004

Theses from 2003 2003

Theses from 2002 2002

Theses from 2000 2000

Theses from 1999 1999

Theses from 1998 1998

Theses from 1996 1996

Theses from 1993 1993

Author Corner

About the Journal

Issue Alerts

Publish in this journal

CELJ Distinguished Editor Award

Affiliations

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Ohio State nav bar

A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature review

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Signed in as

Personal account

Institutional access

IP based access

Sign in through your institution

Sign in with a library card

Society Members

Sign in through society site

Sign in using a personal account

Viewing your signed in accounts

Signed in but can't access content

External resource

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Education About Asia: Online Archives

Share this:

Research Guide for Chinese Studies

Disentangling the cultural evolution of ancient China: a digital humanities perspective

Similar content being viewed by others

Evol project: a comprehensive online platform for quantitative analysis of ancient literature

Network analysis reveals insights about the interconnections of Judaism and Christianity in the first centuries CE

Evolution and transformation of early modern cosmological knowledge: a network study

Introduction

Classic dataset

Era-text dataset

Data processing

Challenge and limitation

Modelling framework

Text-level detection

Overall similarity

Partial similarity

Paraphrased similarity

Book-level aggregation

Community-level inference

Explicit intertextuality

Implicit intertextuality

Settings and modelling results

Manual evaluation of text-level detection

Ablation of community-level inference

Indicator robustness

Study 1. Interaction between scholars and schools

Evolutionary path of philosophical schools