This book focuses on the synthetic and overall study of the history of literary theory, history of art or history of literary critics. Firstly, it proves itself a good combination of the history of thoughts of literature as well as thoughts of art. This book manages to break the barrier barring the two categories of literature and art apart by regarding the literature and art as the expressive form of the leading artistic spirit or aesthetic taste of one period. Secondly, the book makes itself a unification of history of thoughts in general and thoughts of fine arts. The book puts the thoughts of literature and art into the integral structure of social thoughts and ideas, to disclose the mutual fusion and combination of the thoughts of literature and art with the other and to observe the profound implications of the literary thoughts in a circumstance of intertextual interpretation. Thirdly, this book is also a good mixture of general history and monographic study. In another word, this book displays itself as an overview of the history of thoughts in the one hand and constantly probes into particular topics as monograph in the other hand. This book is designed to outline the general thoughts of literature and art for learners in this field and to provide particular topics for researchers who endeavor to acquire featured observation in history of literature or art in Pre-Qin period. The original scale of the book was about 1 million Chinese characters, and now it is abridged to 300 thousand characters.
