People often put national boundaries around the written word. If you read French poetry or Victorian novels, it is tempting to understand those texts strictly in relation to the history and culture of France or Britain. Yet it often helps to take a wider view about literary production. Consider that for many centuries, Chinese provided a common language of literary elites in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Into the 19th century, writers across East Asia were producing their work specifically in classical Chinese, an ancient form of writing in which each character denotes a word, not a sound. Then, with the global tide of modern nationalism, many of those older works became marginalized in the public sphere. But in recent years, that trend has begun changing, according to Wiebke Denecke, a professor in MIT's literature program, and an expert on premodern East Asia. More scholars are again diving into older works written in classical Chinese. Certainly, if Denecke has anything to do...
learn more
