| This dissertation takes issue with the currently popular view that the literary tradition wholly indigenous to China produced no theory of mimesis. While we have to admit that in many respects Western poetics and Chinese poetics do differ, and oftentimes significantly, from each other, as is usual and natural for phenomena from very different cultures, it is the author's belief, however, that it is excessive and even wrong to put Chinese poetics and Western poetics at two opposite poles and call one mimetic and the other non-mimetic or un-mimetic, or to assume that mimesis is simply something Western, and not present in Chinese literary tradition until the very end of the last century. Therefore, the present dissertation focuses on a philological investigation into the Chinese idea about the relationship between literary works and the world, both natural and human, in comparison with the Western conception of artistic mimesis. By juxtaposing the Chinese and Western traditional views on the nature of literature, this dissertation endeavors to demonstrate that a mimetic theory of literature had not only existed but also formed one of the major currents in the early Chinese literary tradition. |
