Lesson 9

ASIAN LITERATURE

CHINA
 It is also known as “The Red Dragon”.
 Chinese literature, the body of works
written in Chinese, including lyric poetry,
historical and didactic writing, drama,
and various forms of fiction.
 Chinese literature is one of the major
literary heritages of the world, with an uninterrupted history of
more than 3,000 years.
 Calligraphy, the art of beautiful handwriting. The term may derive
from the Greek words for “beauty” (kallos) and “to write”
(graphein).

Famous Chinese Writers:

1. Gou Moruo
 The Goddesses
 Translated Geothe’s Sorrow of Young Werther
2. Mo Zi
 The Ethical and Political Works of Motse
 Book of Odes
3. Zhuang Zi
 The Great Happiness
 On Arranging Things

Confucius (Chinese Kung Fu-Tze) was

a descendant of the Shang Kings who
ruled Northern China. Considered as
the greatest Chinese philosopher, he
was by all accounts as homely in
appearance by Chinese standards as
was Socrates to his Greek friends.
However, he was able to win the hearts
and minds of countless millions by the
beautiful simplicity of his teachings.
He laid down moral and ethical principles regulating a wide range of
human conduct not only to promote peace and order but also to
 preserve one’s dignity. He based his teachings on the traditional
respect of the Chinese for the family which, according to him, should
serve as a model of correct relations between men.

EGYPT
 Ancient Egyptian literature comprises a
wide array of narrative and poetic forms
including inscriptions on tombs and
temples; myths, stories, and legends;
religious writings; philosophical works;
autobiographies; biographies; histories;
poetry; hymns; personal essays; letters
and court records. 
 Hieroglyphics (sacred carvings), a writing system combining
phonograms (symbols which represent sound), logograms
(symbols representing words), and ideograms (symbols which
represent meaning or sense).

Famous Egyptians Writers:

1. Nawal El Saadawi
 Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
 God Dies by the Nile
2. Ahmed Fouad Negm
 Hikayat Al-Qasa’id
 Images From Life and Prison
3. Naguib Mahfouz
 The Day the Leader was Killed
 Love and the Veil

INDIA
 Indian literature, writings of the Indian
subcontinent, produced there in a
variety of vernacular languages,
including  Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Bengali,
Bihari, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri,
Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani,
Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Lahnda, Siraiki, and
Sindhi, among others, as well as in
 English.
 The term Indian literature is used here to refer to literature produced
across the Indian subcontinent prior to the creation of the Republic
of India in 1947 and within the Republic of India after 1947.
 Ramayana and Mahabharata are the most important epics of
China.
 Ramayana is about the reincarnation of the creator god
Vishnu in the person of Rama, who is the hero of the epic.
 Mahabharata deals with the other reincarnation of Vishnu in
the person of Krishna. It is considered the greatest epic of
India.

Famous Indian Writers:

1. Rabindranath Tagore
 Gitanjali
 Unending Love
2. Arundhati Roy
 The God of Small Things
 Bandit Queen
3. Anita Desai
 Fire on the Mountain
 The Village by the Sea

Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet and

philosopher and the first Asian to have won the
Nobel Prize for Literature. He is considered a creative
genius. He wrote in various genres and used themes
that transcended both time and place. He also wrote
the National Anthem of Bangladesh.
Writing very early, he published his first book when
he was 17 years old. After a brief stay in England
where he studied law, he came back to India and
became the most important and popular writer of the
colonial era. He wrote in the various genres primarily
in Bengali but translated many of his works into English himself. Readers will find
his writing highly imaginative, deeply religious, and imbued with the love of nature
and his homeland.

JAPAN
  It is also known as “The Land of the
Rising Sun”.
 Japanese literature, the body of written
works produced by Japanese authors in
Japanese or, in its earliest beginnings, at
a time when Japan had no written
language, in the Chinese classical
language.
 Katakana is the basic alphabet in Japan which consists of 47
characters.
 Haiku is the shortest form of Japanese poetry but most popular. It
has 3 lines with 5-7-5 syllables.
 Tanka is a 5 line poem with 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.

Famous Japanese Writers:

1. Haruki Murakami
 The Wind Up Bird Chronicles
 The Elephant Vanishes After the Quake
2. Yukio Mishima
 Confessions of a Mask Thirst for Love
 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
3. Yasunari Kawabata
 Beauty and Sadness
 The House of the Sleeping Beauties