Author ｜
Li Sher-shiueh
Abstract ｜
This paper argues that wenxue, or “literature” as we understand it today, came into being as the result of collaborations that took place between the 17th and 19th centuries among Catholic missionaries and Protestant priests in China. Browsing through early Jesuit works like Guilio Aleni’s Xixue fan, published in 1623, one already witnesses the expression wenyi zhi xue, or “the study of creative writing,” employed to denote what traditional scholars regarded as shi and ci poetry. Aleni’s usage of this term suggests famous sayings by ancient sages, historical accounts of nations, poetry and prose, and argumentative essays. In his Zhifan waiji, also published in 1623, Aleni again referred to literature as wenyi. Some four years later, when the Christian convert Yang Tingyun, changing only one character in Aleni’s phrase, employed the term wenxue in his posthumously published booklet Daiyi süpien, he clearly meant what Aleni had referred to as “literature.” China’s literary modernity therefore has deep roots in Jesuit impact. Before the 20th century, however, Yang’s wenxue was reinforced and even enriched by such Protestant missionaries as Joseph Adkins in his columns on Western Learning, which began appearing in the Shanghai Serial in the 1850s. Adkins provides a general account of Western literature since Homer, introduces distinguished genres such as tragedy and comedy. Further, by including historiography and rhetoric under the rubric of wenxue, he enlarges the scope of this term to its full, modern dimensions, followed by Wei Yuan, Liang Qichao, and Wang Guowei, political, social, and even literary reformists flourished after the Mid-Qing.
keywords ｜
Yang Tinyun, Giulio Aleni, Wei Yuan, Joseph Adkins, literature