In traditional Chinese and western literary theories, "expressing ambition through poetry" and representative theory occupy an extremely important position, and become the source of the development of China's literary theory and western literary theory respectively. On the relationship between art and reality, Chinese and western literary critics have made extremely similar answers, but they have had extremely different influences on the development of Chinese and western literature.
In particular, its influence on literary genre is directly related to China's lyric literature, while the "representative theory" is closely related to western narrative literature. In China ancient literature, there are many references about the relationship between art and reality. Although their opinions are not completely consistent, they all think that literature and art are the reflection of real life and the exposure of writers to real life.
Preface to Mao Shi is the first poetic monograph in ancient China. It clearly points out the poet's ambition. For the sake of expressing ambition, the relationship between emotion and will is discussed for the first time, which injects fresh blood into the ancient theory of expressing ambition. In the Han dynasty, people expressed their desire for poetry, that is, the essence of this poem is to reflect reality with literary works and express thoughts and feelings with literary works.
The understanding of characteristics tends to be clear. With the development of lyric poetry, people have a deeper understanding of lyric characteristics of poetry. From Preface to Mao's Poems to Liu Biao, Zhong Rong, Kong and Zhang Yizhi, until the Qing Dynasty, Ye Xie and Wangfu insisted on emotion. They inherited the lyrical and lyrical characteristics of poetry and realized the unity of content and form.
Feeling things and expressing aspirations, and the blending of feelings and things truly reflect reality: expressing aspirations and beauty are unified, and the social role of poetry is emphasized, requiring poetry to serve politics and religion. Finally, a systematic and complete poetic theory was formed, which had a far-reaching impact on the creation of ancient lyric literature in China. The initial germination of "representative theory" originated from the practical summary of the fine realistic tradition of ancient Greek art.
In ancient Greece, sculpture directly imitated the human body, music imitated natural sounds, and dance imitated productive labor. It is this kind of artistic soil that people imitate in drama practice. Plato reformed the representative theory and put forward that literature and art are imitations of nature, and the shadow of the shadow is divorced from the truth.