ASIAN-LITERATURE about chinese and korea

This give you a background information about the asian literature and a chinese culture and their doings

1. Tell Something about the Pictures.

2. Asia is known to be the most populous and largest continent of the planet. It is a cradle of human race, world religions, and civilizations which is composed of widespread varieties of ethnic group, diverse cultures, environments, economics, historical linkages, and varied governmental system making it riches in written literature. Since it is the biggest continent, a wealth of written and spoken text have been recorded.

3. ASIAN LITERATURE Asian Literature encompasses various facets of literature. Primarily, these are the poetry and prose writings produced in a variety of languages in Asia. As religion, was, and politics influence Asian communities, literary flourished to emulate these developments.

4. The literary mores of Asia which is considered the largest continent of the world are immense in terms of scope and length of existence. With these, it is prudent to take a literary exploration of Asian Literature by geographical region. By its technical term, it is basically the literary products made in continent Asia throughout history.

5. Asian literature reflects the similarities in customs and traditions of African and Asian countries, their philosophies of life, and the struggles and successes of their developing nations and its people.

6. CHINA ❖ Chinese literature is one of the major literary heritages of the world, with an uninterrupted history of more than 3,000 years, dating back at least to the 14th century BCE.

7. ❖ This body of works is in Chinese. It has more than 50,000 published works in a wide range of topics.

8. ❖ The Tang Dynasty is the finest era of the Chinese literature because the poets like Tu Fu, Li Po and Wang Wei created landmark works.

9. ❖ Du Fu or Tu Fu (712-770) is considered as China’s greatest poet. He was known for his works of lushi . A lushi has eight lines, each of which has five or seven syllables following a strict tonal pattern. It became widely popular during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), the golden age of art and literature in Chinese history.

10. ❖ Li Bai (701-762), also called Li Po, rivaled Du Fu for the title of China’s greatest poet. Unlike Du Fu, he wrote less formal verse forms. A famous drinker, he frequently celebrated drinking in his poetry.

11. JAPAN This body works is mostly in Japanese, except the early writings which were written in Chinese.

12. ❖ Both in quantity and quality, Japanese literature ranks as one of the major literatures of the world, comparable in age, richness, and volume to English literature, though its course of development has been quite dissimilar. The surviving works comprise a literary tradition extending from the 7th century CE to the present.

13. Kakinomoto Hitomaro , Japan’s first literary figure was known for his works of tanka and choka . The tanka, the basic form of Japanese poetry, has five lines in five-seven- fiveseven -seven syllable pattern. On the other hand, the choka has alternating lines of five and seven syllables and ends with an extra line of seven syllables. Having no definite length, it can have from seven lines to 150. Hitomaro’s works were included in Man’yoshu , the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry during the Nara Period (710-784).

14. Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) was regarded as the supreme haiku poet. Emerged from the early Tokugawa period (1603-1770), the haiku is composed of three lines of a renga , a poem usually with a hundred linked verses. Basho’s verses appear with his travel accounts like The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1694).

15. The old pond A frog jumps in Sound of water

16. It’s December one I’m here waiting for a gift Your love and presence.

17. It is Christmas time, A season of love and peace The birth of Jesus.

18. KOREA ❖ Korean literature consists the body of works written by Koreans, at first in Classical Chinese, later in various transcription systems using Chinese characters, and finally in Hangul.

19. ❖ Although Korea has had its own language for several thousand years, it has had a writing system only since the mid15th century, when Hangul was invented. As a result, early literary activity was in Chinese characters. Korean scholars were writing poetry in the traditional manner of Classical Chinese at least by the 4th century CE.

20. ❖ By the 7th century a system, called idu , had been devised that allowed Koreans to make rough transliterations of Chinese texts. Eventually, certain Chinese characters were used for their phonetic value to represent Korean particles of speech and inflectional endings.

21. ❖ In general, then, literature written in Korea falls into three categories: works written in the early transcription systems, those written in Hangul, and those written in Chinese.

22. ❖ There are four major traditional poetic forms in Korean Literature Hyangga (“native songs”) poems were written in four, eight, or 10 lines; the 10- line form—comprising two four-line stanzas and a concluding two-line stanza— was the most popular and oldest form in Korean literature.

23. Pyŏlgok (“special songs”) or changga flourished during the middle and late Koryŏ period. It is characterized by a refrain either in the middle or at the end of each stanza. The theme of most of these anonymous poems is love, the joys and torments of which are expressed in frank and powerful language.

24. Sijo (“current melodies”) is the longest-enduring and most popular form of Korean poetry. Sijo are three-line poems in which each line has 14 to 16 syllables and the total number of syllables seldom exceeds 45. Each line consists of groups of four syllables. Sijo may deal with Confucian ethical values, but there are also many poems about nature and love.

25. Kasa (“verses”) tends to be much longer than other forms of Korean poetry and is usually written in balanced couplets. During the earlier period, the poem was generally about 100 lines long and dealt with such subjects as female beauty, war, and seclusion.

26. ❖ In another system, kugyŏl , abridged versions of Chinese characters were used to denote grammatical elements and were inserted into texts during transcription.

27. ❖ Existing literary works indicate, however, that before the 20th century much of Korean literature was written in Chinese rather than in Korean, even after the invention of Hangul.

28. Korean Poet Spotlight Seo Jeong- ju (May 18, 1915 – December 24,2000) was a Korean poet and university professor. He taught Korean literature in universities, who wrote under the pen name “ Midang ”.

29. He is widely considered as one of the best poets in twentieth century Korean literature and was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in literature. His grandmother’s stories and his interest in Buddhism had a strong influence upon his writing.

30. He wrote over 1,000 poems over more than 60 years and had considerable influence on Korean literature, being considered the ‘founding father of modern Korean poetry’. Under the pen name Midang , he published at least 15 collections of poetry. His works have been translated into several languages, including English, French, Spanish, and German. His 100th anniversary in December 2016 was commemorated by the republication of his collected works which included recently discovered and previously unpublished poems.

31. Indian Literature This body of works is produced in India in a variety of vernacular languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Urdu.

32. The Mahabharata is an Indian epic written in Sanskrit. It is the longest poem in history with about 100,000 couplets. It is traditionally ascribed to an Indian sage named Vyasa. The Hindus regard the epic as both a text about dharna (the Hindu moral law) and a history. Bhagavadgita , the most celebrated of its episodes, gives spiritual guidance.

33. The Ramayana is another Indian epic in Sanskrit. The sage Valmiki was traditionally regarded as its author. It is shorter than Mahabharata, with some 24,000 couplets.

34. The Panchatantra is a collection of Indian animal fables. Originally written in Sanskrit, it is a mixture of prose and verse. The stories are attributed to Vishnusharman , a learned Brahmin