First, the development of ancient literature and art in China
(A) China ancient literature
In China's classical literature, poetry is the most developed. The Shang Dynasty was formed at the latest in 1 500 BC. Among China's earliest poetry anthology The Book of Songs, Ode to Shang Dynasty is an epic of Shang Dynasty. The Book of Songs is a collection of works by folk poets, officials and scholars in the past 500 years before the mid-Spring and Autumn Period, including 305 articles in three categories: wind, elegance and ode, covering the history of ancestors, productive labor and various social things, showing the sincere feelings of all social strata in real life and establishing the realistic tradition of China's poetry. It is mainly composed of four words, and it uses a lot of rhetorical devices such as overlapping sentences and fu, bi and xing. It has a strong artistic appeal and is regarded as a classic by later generations, which has a great and far-reaching influence on China literature.
If The Book of Songs established the realistic tradition of China's poetry, then Chu Ci, which was developed on the basis of folk songs in southern Chu, was the romantic pioneer of China's poetry. Qu Yuan, a writer of Chu Ci in the Warring States Period, was the first great patriotic poet in the history of China literature. His Li Sao represents the highest achievement of China's works of Chu Ci. Lisao is the longest lyric narrative poem in ancient China, which expresses the poet's desire to refresh politics, save Chu and unify China. Among them, "lead the horse, come to my way first!" Expressed the poet's determination to serve the motherland; "Taking a long breath to hide tears and mourn the people's sufferings" expressed his deep concern and sympathy for the people's sufferings. When the poet was persecuted by politics and exiled in a foreign land, he expressed his unyielding spirit of pursuing his ideals with the phrase "The road is long and Xiu Yuan is Xi, and I will go up and down". The poet developed his absurd fantasy. After despairing of reality, he wandered up and down in the spiritual world of the natural universe. When he was about to break away from vulgarity and enter the bright sky, he suddenly saw his hometown and felt extremely worried and sad, so "my servant was sad and worried, but he took pains", and he did not want to leave his difficult motherland and people after all. Li Sao, with its broad artistic conception, fantastic artistic conception and strong romanticism, interweaves real life and fantasy world, national destiny and personal experience, as well as exotic natural scenery and intricate strong feelings, makes the whole poem magnificent, ups and downs, colorful, and filled with the poet's noble character and infinite love and attachment for the motherland and the people between the lines, which is worthy of being a dazzling pearl in the history of China literature.
During the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties, China Yuefu folk songs shone brilliantly. Among them are Shang Mo Sang, A Journey to the Louvre in Yan Ge, Shang Xie and other vigorous, simple and fresh works. The long narrative poems "Peacock Flying Southeast" and "Mulan Poetry" are even more famous works in the poetry circle. Nineteen Ancient Poems in the Eastern Han Dynasty has high literary value, which makes China's five-character poems mature. Liu Xie commented that it is "straight but not wild, tactfully attached, sad and sincere, which is the highest of the five words." (1) The poem "Yongming Style" at the time of Qi and Liang Dynasties originated from China's metrical poems, which laid the foundation for the maturity of modern poetry. In the Tang Dynasty, there were many schools of poetry, with Li Bai, Du Fu and Bai Juyi as outstanding representatives, which held up the golden age of China's classical poetry.
Li Bai is another great positive romantic poet after Qu Yuan, with more than 900 existing poems. He has profound attainments in Yuefu poems, long sentences, quatrains and metrical poems. His works include love for the magnificent mountains and rivers of the motherland, contempt for secular dignitaries, praise for sincere friendship and many other aspects. Li Bai's poems are passionate, bold and elegant in style and unpredictable in brushwork. There is the majestic momentum of "How the water of the Yellow River moves out of the sky", the extraordinary imagination of "Doubt is that the Milky Way has fallen for nine days", the bold exaggeration of "Three thousands of feet with White Hair", and the innocence of "Looking up, I found it was moonlight, and then sinking back, I suddenly thought of home". He left many immortal swan songs and reached the peak of romantic art.
Du Fu is a master of the realistic tradition since The Book of Songs, with more than 400 existing poems/kloc-0. With his superb brushwork, he created a large number of wonderful works full of real life flavor, such as Auto Shop, Hope in Spring, Three Officials and Three Farewells. His poetic style is profound, his writing is objective, and his lines are full of warnings. "Whether it is vigorous, tragic, unrestrained, magnificent, simple, simple or brisk, victory can be achieved." There is a strong sense of patriotism in his outrageous poems. For example, "although the country is divided, the mountains and rivers last forever, and the vegetation turns green in spring." Petals fall like tears, and lonely birds sing their sadness. " He not only pushed realism to the peak in the field of poetry, but also promoted the ideological achievements of Tang poetry to the extreme.
China's drama is an art form that combines song and dance, rap and ancient humor and satire. A relatively complete system was formed in the Song and Jin Dynasties, and it was unprecedentedly prosperous in the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties. Drama in Yuan Dynasty is dominated by zaju, with more than 200 zaju writers and more than 40 existing scripts/kloc-0. Guan Hanqing is a superstar in the field of drama creation and the pioneer of Yuan Zaju. He wrote 60 plays in his life. Dou E's representative works profoundly expose and attack the dark and cruel reality through the tragic image of Dou E, an ordinary woman who died of strange injustice, and praise the kind character, tenacious personality and unyielding resistance spirit of this lower class woman. With a strong tragic atmosphere and bold romanticism, it greatly deepened the theme of the work and made it an earth-shattering masterpiece. As early as 1838, Dou was translated into English and spread abroad. From 65438 to 0958, Guan Hanqing was listed as one of the world cultural celebrities. The Romance of the West Chamber by another outstanding dramatist, Wang Shifu, vividly expresses the theme that young men and women oppose feudal ethics and pursue freedom of marriage and love through the successful shaping of Cui Yingying and matchmaker. It is an unparalleled comedy with strong poetry, rigorous structure and repeated training. In the script system, it broke the stereotype of a book with four folds and the form of one solo, and adopted the way of multi-person rotation and duet, which made the stage atmosphere more active. In addition, Ji's Orphan of Zhao is also a masterpiece of the Yuan Dynasty. It was translated into French around 1733, then published in English, German and Russian, and presented on the European stage. Legend is the most prosperous drama in Ming Dynasty. Since the Song Dynasty, it has been developed on the basis of "Wenzhou Zaju", that is, Southern Opera. Not limited by space, a large number of folk songs and new tunes are used, and dialects are often used, and artistic expressions are diversified. The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu is the representative of the highest achievement of this kind of legend. With positive romanticism, unique artistic conception, poetic language and strong lyrical color, it describes the unusual and desperate love story of Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei, a young man and woman, which has strong artistic appeal and is called Romeo and Juliet in the East. "Peach Blossom Fan" written by Confucius in Qing Dynasty, "Writing the Feeling of Rise and Fall through Divorce", takes the love story of Fu She literati and Qinhuai prostitute Li as the main line, reflecting the history of the collapse of the court in the late Ming Dynasty. It is unique and successfully interweaves the joys and sorrows of personal love with the fate of the country, which is a major breakthrough in the history of China's drama. After Qianlong, China local operas flourished. In addition to the original Kunqu opera, different series of local operas have been formed. Such as Jin Opera, Qin Opera, xiang opera Opera and Wu Opera in Bangzi Opera; Han Opera, Min Opera, Dian Opera and Cantonese Opera in Pihuang Opera. At the same time, local folk operas are also competing with each other. For example, the Flower Drum Opera in Hunan, Hubei, the Lantern Opera in Yunnan, Sichuan, the Tea Picking Opera in Jiangxi, the Huangmei Opera in Anhui, and the Jumping from a Building (Pingju) in Northeast Hebei are the most influential Peking Opera. In terms of art, the scripts of local operas adopt various artistic elements such as dialects, local tunes, songs, folk songs and dances, Quyi, etc., which have a strong local style and distinctive folk colors. It laid a solid foundation for the prosperity of local drama in China.
(B) China ancient art
It is a fact that China's ancient music has been ahead of the world for a long time, which is rarely mentioned. As early as more than 4000 years ago, Ling Lun, the minister of the Yellow Emperor, set five scales according to the length of bamboo tubes: public, commercial, diplomatic, health and Henan. In the Warring States period, China had the voice of "changing the levy", and in the Western Han Dynasty, there was the voice of "changing the palace". So far, China's score has seven notes. In the west, Pythagoras defined pentatonic scale by chord length in the 6th century BC, which was later than the Theory of Spirits 1 700 years. 1 1 there are only six sounds in the west in the century, and all seven sounds are ready later. In the Western Han Dynasty, China legalist Jing Fang created a thirteen-string "quasi-"law, which made syllables adjustable. Zhu Zaixiang, a musician in the Ming Dynasty, was the first in the history of world music to divide temperament with equal proportion series. In the book "Law and Lv Zheng", he systematically expounded the law of twelve averages. There were many kinds of musical instruments in ancient China. Linglun makes silk, bamboo and so on. During the Western Zhou Dynasty, Chinese musical instruments had formed eight categories: silk, bamboo, bamboo, earth, leather, wood, gold and stone. China's ancient poems are all sung to the music. From the four-character poems in The Book of Songs, the five-character poems in Han Yuefu, to the changes in the forms of Tang poetry, Song poetry and Yuan music, it is inseparable from the changes in music. The combination of poetry and songs and the expression of musical language make China's songs have strong artistic appeal and high aesthetic value. The expression of China's songs is also quite wonderful. Liu Bang's song of great winds, sung by 120 children, greatly exaggerated his inspiring feelings of worrying about the country. The Southern Dynasties' "Good Lotus Picking in the South of the Yangtze River" is precious in the world music history because of its rotating style 1 500 years ago. In "Farewell to Weicheng" written by Wang Wei in the Tang Dynasty, the singer sang the last sentence "People who left Yangguan in the West for no reason" for three times, forming the famous "Three Layers of Yangguan", which greatly enhanced the artistic conception of farewell and made China's songs shine. Ancient China also made many achievements in instrumental music. Among them are Mountain Flowing Water, Eighteen Beats of Hu Jia, Guangling San, Three Lane of Plum Blossoms, Xiaoxiang Cloud Water, Guan Shanyue, House of Flying Daggers, Yangchun Ancient Songs and so on. They are all classic works of China's instrumental music.
China dance also developed very early. Shun Shao dance, with Shao music. Zhou had dances of "Da Wu" and "Ba Shu", and "Ba Shu Atlas" was handed down from generation to generation. Corner drama in Han Dynasty is a comprehensive art form of juggling and dancing, which has been popular until Song Dynasty. Yuefu, the official music and dance organization, was established in the Han Dynasty, which cultivated a large number of professional artists, and the wind of singing and dancing was very popular. Almost all styles, styles and genres of modern dance in China can be traced back to China dance. Yushu backyard flower, the court music and dance of the Southern Dynasties, still exists in Japan. The famous King of Qin Dance in the Tang Dynasty, accompanied by broken music, gathered 128 people to dance with halberds in armor, which was magnificent and spectacular. Historically, its dancers and music are known to be "vigorous and generous". (1) Dress dancing in the Tang Dynasty is also a large-scale court dance. Its dance is gentle and elegant, and its artistic level is extremely high. Since the Song Dynasty, while continuing to develop independently, China dance has been integrated into colorful dramas together with music, performance and acrobatics.
Long before the appearance of Xuan paper, China had made great artistic achievements in murals and silk paintings in ancient times. Tourist maps, music and dance maps and waiting maps in the Eastern Han Dynasty are outstanding representatives of early stone murals. In particular, the latter depicts two maids delivering food in a big restaurant, and the guests are like clouds. The maids carefully take care of the dishes on the plate and squint at the guests in the room. The expressions of the characters are extremely subtle. Among them, the former maid's left and right faces have different expressions, and the expressions take care of both sides. Experts say that it is similar to 1, the famous painting "The Maiden of avignon" by Picasso in the west more than 700 years later. Dunhuang Grottoes in Wei, Jin, Sui and Tang Dynasties are a world-famous comprehensive art library of murals and sculptures. Its scale is the largest in the world. It has 492 complete grottoes, more than 2,000 statues and more than 45,000 square meters of murals. It takes Buddhism as its theme, with vivid images, neat composition, gorgeous colors and rich imagination, which are amazing. Taoist murals in Yongle Palace in Yuan Dynasty are also one of the best murals in China. It takes the story of Lv Dongbin and "Eight Immortals" as the theme, with free and easy painting, vivid character expression and inner portrayal. The earliest existing independent painting in China is the silk painting of Chu Tomb in the Warring States Period, The Dragon and Phoenix Curtain of Figures, which is simple and vivid in shape and smooth in lines, showing the tradition of vivid forms in Chinese painting with lines as the main means of expression. Gu Kaizhi's History of Women in the Eastern Jin Dynasty and Gu's Night Banquet in the Southern Tang Dynasty are outstanding representatives of China's figure paintings before the Five Dynasties. The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival by Zhang Zeduan in the Northern Song Dynasty, with Bianjing and its suburbs as the background, depicts the activities of more than 500 people from all walks of life and reflects the prosperity of commerce, handicrafts and urban life in the Song Dynasty. The whole picture is detailed and vivid. It is not only a masterpiece of figure painting, but also a great picture of China's ancient secular life. China's landscape painting had made great achievements before the Tang Dynasty. When Emperor Huan of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Liu Bao "painted a map", which attracted people's attention. He drew a picture of the north wind, which made people feel cold. (1) During the Three Kingdoms period, Mrs. Zhao, the king of Wu, was good at painting rivers and lakes, Kyushu and wuyue, which was "unique and unparalleled". (2) After the Five Dynasties, China landscape painting entered its heyday, and the painting world was full of stars. Fan Kuan in the Northern Song Dynasty, Ma Yuan in the Southern Song Dynasty, four famous painters in the Yuan Dynasty (Wang Meng, Ni Zan, Zhenwu and Huang) and Shi Tao in the Qing Dynasty were all famous landscape painters. China's flower-and-bird paintings developed unprecedentedly in the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, forming traditional themes such as "Three Friends in Cold Years" and "Four Gentlemen". Unlike the Palace Painting Academy in the Song Dynasty, it has deliberately pursued the truth of details, but paid attention to the simplicity of pen and ink, and pursued more "spirit likeness" to express the author's subjective interest and interest in pen and ink. This is also the highest realm of China's freehand brushwork. Wang Mian's Mo Mei Tu, Zhu Da's Lotus Bird and Zheng Xie's Wind Bamboo Tu are all examples of China's freehand flower-and-bird painting.
There are many unique types and fields of ancient art in China. For example, China's calligraphy, with its abstract combination of dots, lines and surfaces and changing rhythm, affects the calligrapher's life thoughts and inner rhythm, giving people emotional infection and aesthetic enjoyment. Han and Wei Dynasties became an independent art form. The Western Jin Dynasty entered its heyday, with various styles of orthography, cursive script, official script, seal script and various derived fonts, and calligraphers such as Wang Xizhi appeared. China's architecture, gardens, sculptures, bonsai, pottery, jade, bronzes, lacquerware, splendid scenery, folk paper-cutting and clay sculpture are all examples.
Second, the basic character and characteristics of China's literature and art.
There are many kinds of ancient literature and art in China, with different forms, contents and styles, so it is difficult to generalize. However, they are all dominated or influenced by the overall spirit of traditional culture, which inevitably forms many * * * principles among various arts. This paper gives priority to literature, giving consideration to others, and summarizes the basic character and characteristics of ancient literature and art in China.