Sabina Knight – författare

Perhaps nowhere else has literature been as conscious a collective endeavor as in China, and China's survival over three thousand years may owe more to its literary traditions than to its political history. This 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, Sabina Knight 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, Knight draws on lively examples to underscore the close relationship between ethics and aesthetics, as well as the diversity of Chinese thought. Knight also illuminates the role of elite patronage; the ways literature has served the interests of specific groups; and questions of canonization, language, nationalism, and cross-cultural understanding. The book includes Chinese characters for names, titles, and key terms. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

By examining how narrative strategies reinforce or contest deterministic paradigms, this work describes modern Chinese fiction's unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. How does Chinese fiction express the desire for freedom as well as fears of attendant responsibilities and abuses? How does it depict struggles for and against freedom? How do the texts allow for or deny the possibility of freedom and agency? By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the twentieth century. She links these changes to representations of time and to enduring commitments to human-heartedness and social justice.Although Chinese fiction may contain some of the most disconsolate pages in the twentieth century's long literature of disenchantment, it also bespeaks, Knight argues, a passion for freedom and moral responsibility. Responding to ongoing conflicts between the claims of modernity and the resources of past traditions, these stories and novels are often dominated by challenges to human agency. Yet read with sensitivity to traditional Chinese conceptions of moral experience, their testimony to both the promises of freedom and the failure of such promises opens new perspectives on moral agency.

В этом "Наикратчайшем введении" читатели познакомятся с историей китайской литературы от древнейших времен до наших дней. Поднебесная просуществовала несколько тысячетлетий скорее благодаря литературным традициям, а не политическим институтам. Сабиина Найт рассказывает о ктиайской философии, поэзии, легендах, драматическом театре и художественной прозе, а также о том, как в китайских литературных произведениях отображаются исторические травмы и развиваются духовные и нравственные начала. Автор особенно подчеркивает значение элит в поддержании литературной деятельность, и роль, которую литература сыграла в обеспечении интересов определенных социальных групп, а также проблемы канонизации, языка, национализма и межкультурного взаимопонимания.