Poetry is a literary genre. Through language, it not only expresses the meaning of words, but also expresses emotion and beauty, thus producing * * *. Poetry can form its own style or be combined with other arts, such as poetic drama, hymns, lyrics or prose poems. Words with music are called songs. "Poetry" is rooted in concise and powerful imagination and perception, or linked with experience, ideas and emotional reactions, and reorganizes meaning, conscious and subconscious expression, symbol, formal or informal style, sound and rhythm according to certain rules. This type of literature includes narrative, drama, satire, exhortation, pornography and personal form.
Poetry is an art with a long history. Early attempts to define poetry include Aristotle's Poetics, which mainly focuses on rhetoric and the use of words in drama, songs and comedies. Later, people thought that poetry was characterized by reciting, requiring the format and rhythm of sentence paragraphs and emphasizing the aesthetic feeling of poetry, which was called verse to distinguish it from prose. By the middle of the twentieth century, the definition of poetry became loose, that is, the basic creation in language.
Poetry comes from primitive religions, myths, oral literature, labor songs and folk songs of ancient people. In ancient times, there were many poems that could be sung. Poetry was often combined with music and dance, so it was also called "poetry".
The earliest recorded poem is Veda in India (BC 1700- 1200). There have been poems in Europe since ancient Greece, and famous poets include Homer, Sappho and Pindar. Famous poets in ancient Rome include Catullus, Virgil and Horace.
China's poems are often called "poems" or "lines of poetry". China's poetry has a long history. His early poems include The Book of Songs, Songs of the South and Han Yuefu. Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties are the heyday of poetry, which is generally called Tang Poetry, Song Ci and Yuan Qu. However, ancient poems and modern poems appeared before the Tang Dynasty, and many people wrote poems after the Tang and Song Dynasties. Poetry has certain metrical requirements. According to research, many poems could have been sung, but most of the music has been lost. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Zhang Hui's novels and operas rose, and many novels and operas also contained poems. During the May 4th Movement of the Republic of China, vernacular Chinese became popular, and many people began to write modern poems, which broke the requirements of previous poems for meter.
essay
Prose is one of the four major literary genres. This is a free and flexible style to express what you see and feel. It pays no attention to phonemes, parallelism and any restrictions. It is also the earliest style of writing in China. Usually, an article has one or more central ideas, which are expressed by lyric, narrative and logical means.
What we usually call prose is narrow sense prose, mainly lyrical prose and philosophical prose, whose main feature is "scattered in form but not scattered in spirit"
Pre-Qin Prose: At present, the earliest collection of essays in China is Shangshu, which is dedicated to memorizing words; The earliest essay should belong to Shangshu? Pan Geng in Shangshu. Historians agree that this is a reliable document in the Yin and Shang Dynasties. According to legend, Pan Geng was the Zhongxing monarch of Shang Dynasty. He once moved the capital to Yin, but his subjects opposed him. So he made three speeches to explain why he moved the capital. Pan Geng's three articles are the records of these speeches.
During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, a hundred schools of thought contended in the history of China's thoughts, and prose developed by leaps and bounds. Hundred schools of thought's famous essays include The Analects of Confucius and Laozi, as well as many important thinkers, such as Mozi, Zhuangzi, Mencius, Han Feizi, Lv Chunqiu and Xunzi. The emergence of Zuozhuan, Guoyu and Warring States Policy set a good example for China's narrative literature.
Prose in the Han Dynasty: The most influential prose in the Han Dynasty is Historical Records written by Sima Qian in the Western Han Dynasty, followed by Hanshu written by Ban Gu in the Eastern Han Dynasty, which complement each other and constitute the best example of China's history books. Other political articles include Wang Chong's Lun Heng, Zhong Changtong's Chang Yan, Liu Shao's People and Huan Kuan's On Salt and Iron.
Prose in Tang and Song Dynasties: In view of the extravagance of parallel prose in the Six Dynasties, Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan in the Tang Dynasty began to call for the movement of ancient prose, trying to replace the heavy parallel prose with fresh prose. Therefore, easy-to-write and easy-to-read prose gradually became popular in the Tang Dynasty.
After Han Yu, with Ouyang Xiu, Su San (Su Xun, Su Shi, Su Zhe), Ceng Gong and Wang Anshi as pioneers, prose in the Song Dynasty was widely circulated. Together with Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan in the Tang Dynasty, the six of them are called "the eight masters of ancient prose in the Tang and Song Dynasties", leaving a brilliant page in the history of China's prose.
Prose in Ming Dynasty: The political characteristics of stereotyped writing in Ming Dynasty made some intellectuals react to stereotyped writing at that time. The literary group, headed by the former seven sons, advocates antique and retro, emphasizing that "literature must be in the Qin and Han Dynasties, and poetry must flourish in the Tang Dynasty". For a time, imitating the prose of Qin and Han dynasties was very popular. But blindly copying and imitating is not a good creative mentality after all, and the value of the works produced is limited. Therefore, the emergence of essays such as Gong 'an School and Jingling School, which opposed the simulated atmosphere, injected new breath into the prose of the Ming Dynasty.
Modern Prose: Since the May 4th Movement, China's modern prose has absorbed western ideas, and after being popularized by writers such as Lu Xun, it has become the mainstream of literature alongside poems, novels and operas. Prose is easy to read and write, which makes this style widely used. Almost all students' compositions are expressed in the form of essays, so it can be said that everyone knows how to write.
novel
Novel is a literary style, which generally describes the story of characters and shapes various characters, but there are exceptions. It is a literary work with complete layout, development and theme. Whether the dialogue has a distinct personality and whether each character's words have a unique language style is an important criterion to measure the level of novels.
Compared with other literary styles, the novel has a large capacity, which can show the characters' character and destiny in detail, show the intricate contradictions and conflicts, and describe the social life environment in which the characters live. The advantage of novels is that they can provide a complete and broad social life.
The word "novel" first appeared in Zhuangzi Foreign Things: "The novel is decorated as a county magistrate, far from reaching the top." The novel mentioned here refers to trivial talk and petty truths, which is far from the novel mentioned now. In literature, novels usually refer to novels, novellas, short stories and poems.
English "novel" refers to novels, and "fiction" refers to fictional story works (not limited to words). Strictly speaking, there is no single suitable English word for Chinese "novels", but most of them will be translated into novels.
/kloc-Before the 0/9th century, eastern and western novels developed independently.
Ban Gu's "Records of Arts and Literature" in the Eastern Han Dynasty: "Novelists flow because of officials, talk in the streets and talk through hearsay." That is to say, in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, novels refer to the folk gossip in the streets and lanes, which has no meaning of novels now (although at that time, articles like Yan Danzi can already be regarded as novels in the modern sense). In "Zhuangzi", I tasted the cloud: "Decorate a novel as a county magistrate." The "novel" here refers to some words that have nothing to do with the avenue, that is, the so-called essays, which were proposed for the avenue at that time. This was the case until the Han Dynasty.
During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, China began to appear note novels, such as Shi Shuo Xin Yu, Gan Bao Sou and Zhang Hua's Natural History edited by Liu Yiqing in the Southern Song Dynasty. These books are influenced by folk myths and legends, and their contents have the embryonic form of novels.
In the Sui and Tang Dynasties, a style called "Legend" began to appear in China. This style can be said to be a short story in classical Chinese with complex and complete themes and superb narrative skills, which can be roughly divided into love categories, such as: Yuan Zhen's Biography of Yingying; Chivalrous people, such as Du Guangting's "Campus Guest Biography"; As well as these three kinds of monsters, most of them are collected in Li Yun's Taiping Guangji in the Song Dynasty.
In addition, there were variations in the Tang Dynasty. Bianwen is a kind of literature which combines poetry and prose (rhyme and white), rap and story layout. At the earliest, in order to spread Buddhist teachings, stories told by folk monks specializing in storytelling appeared, such as Mulian's saving mother. Later, some people wrote historical stories based on the combination of rhyme and white, such as Biography of Fei Ming and Biography of Various Countries. The novels that influenced the Ming and Qing Dynasties are always mixed with some poems, songs and parallel prose, which can be regarded as the conversion of bianwen.
In the Song Dynasty, due to the introduction of twice-yearly Zhancheng rice (green revolution) and the use of bellows (fire innovation), the economy of the Song Dynasty grew rapidly, and the affluent lower class people increased. With spare money, drinking tea, listening to books and telling books in teahouses naturally became popular, and novels began in Song Renzong. Most of the story books made by storytellers are explained in spoken vernacular, and many of the story contents of these storytellers are taken as reference by the authors of Zhang Hui's novels in later generations. Zhou Mi's "Old Wulin Stories" Volume 6 "The Geisha" provides a list of historical lecturers in Lin 'an in the Southern Song Dynasty.
The representative of China's vernacular novels is Zhang Hui's novels, which began to take concrete forms in Yuan Dynasty and became the mainstream of novels in Ming and Qing Dynasties. In the Yuan Dynasty, there were Outlaws of the Marsh, Wu Cheng'en The Journey to the West, Lan Ling Xiao Xiaosheng's Jin Ping Mei, Luo Guanzhong's Romance of the Three Kingdoms (the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is special, and the content and style are classical Chinese novels written by Zhang Hui), and in the early Qing Dynasty, there were Cao Xueqin's Dream of Red Mansions and Wu's Scholars. In the late Qing Dynasty, due to the invasion of foreign powers and domestic corruption, satirical content of current politics gradually appeared in novels, which were called "condemnation novels", such as The Appearance of Officialdom, Flowers of Evil, Wu's Unusual Symptoms in Twenty Years, and Liu E's Travels of the Old Disabled. , are representatives of satirical novels in the late Qing Dynasty, and the above four books are collectively called the "Four Great Late Qing Dynasties".
Although the style of novels in the Ming and Qing Dynasties is mainly Zhang Hui novels, there are still non-Zhang Hui novels in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, such as Feng Menglong's Three Stories (Yu Shi,,, Xing Yan) and Ling Mengchu's Er Pai (one moment surprised, the next moment surprised) and other vernacular short stories. In addition, Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio in the Qing Dynasty was written in classical Chinese, and its content system was similar to that of Tang legends.
After the Republic of China, eastern and western novels gradually merged, and Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman was the first vernacular novel in modern China. Today, China's novels are still emerging one after another, but there are still many questions about creative freedom.
drama
Drama is an art in which actors perform stories or situations through dialogue, singing or action. Drama has four elements: actors, stories (situations), stages (performance venues) and audiences. "Actor" is the most important element of the four. He is the spokesman of the role and must have the ability to take responsibility. The biggest difference between drama and other arts is acting. Through the actor's performance, the role in the script can be extended. If you give up the actor's play, the performance will no longer be a drama.
There are various forms of theatrical performances, including drama, opera, ballet, musical, puppet show and so on. Due to different cultural backgrounds, drama forms produced by different cultures often have unique traditions and programs, such as western drama, China drama, Indian Brahma drama, Japanese energy rate, kabuki and so on.
The concept of modern drama emphasizes the unified expression of all performing elements inside and outside the stage in order to achieve comprehensive artistic effects. Performance elements include actors, stage, props, lighting, sound effects, costumes, makeup, scripts, directors and so on. , and the relationship between the performance on stage and the interaction under the stage (generally called "viewing relationship"). The concept of drama in literature refers to a script created for dramatic performance, or called a script.
The word "Chinese Opera" comes from the general name of "Southern Opera and Northern Opera". Traditional Chinese opera refers to traditional Chinese opera, and traditional Chinese opera refers to zaju, which is a different performing art formed in different political and cultural environments in the north and south of China before the Yuan Dynasty. After the Ming dynasty, the two were collectively called.
Words close to the word "drama" in languages all over the world cover different scopes. For example, the word lila in Indian includes not only drama, but also dance and sports. However, the words related to "drama" in almost all languages in the world have almost the same meaning as "game". For example, in English, a play is called play (usually a play with a script and dialogue). The word "play" in Chinese also means "game".
There are three ancient drama cultures in the world, including Greek tragedy and comedy, Indian Brahma drama and China drama. It is called "drama" to distinguish it from western "drama".
There are many hypotheses about the origin of drama. There are two mainstream views: one is the witchcraft ceremony of primitive religion. For example, in ancient China, the words "witch", "dance" and "martial arts" have the same origin, which may be a general term for witchcraft activities praying for victory in battle, that is, the primitive form of drama. The other is an impromptu song and dance performance when working or celebrating the harvest. This statement is mainly based on the fact that ancient Greek drama is thought to have originated from Dionysian sacrifice.