Asian literature is the literature produced in

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an area ...

Examples

*East Asian literature ** Chinese literature ** Japanese literature ** Korean literature **

Mongolian literature Mongolian literature has been greatly influenced by its nomadic oral traditions. The "three peaks" of Mongol literature, ''The Secret History of the Mongols'', ''Epic of King Gesar'' and '' Epic of Jangar'', all reflect the age-long tradition of h ...

** Taiwanese literature *South Asian literature ** Indian literature **

Pakistani literature Pakistani literature ( ur, ) is a distinct literature that gradually came to be defined after Pakistan gained nationhood status in 1947, emerging out of literary traditions of the South Asia. The shared tradition of Urdu literature and English l ...

Bangladeshi folk literature Bangladeshi Folk Literature ( bn, বাংলাদেশি লোক সাহিত্য) constitutes a considerable portion of Bengali literature. Though it was created by illiterate communities and passed down orally from one generation ...

** Sri Lankan literature ** Bhutanese literature *Southeast Asian literature **

Thai literature 300px, ''Samut Thai'', a traditional medium for recordation and transmission of Thai and other literature in mainland Southeast Asia Thai literature is the literature of the Thai people, almost exclusively written in the Thai language (althoug ...

Philippine literature Philippine literature is literature associated with the Philippines from prehistory, through its colonial legacies, and on to the present. Pre-Hispanic Philippine literature was actually epics passed on from generation to generation, o ...

Malaysian literature Malaysian literature is the collection of literary works produced in the Malay peninsula until 1963 and in Malaysia thereafter. Malaysian literature is typically written in any of the country's four main languages: Malay, English, Chinese a ...

** Indonesian literature **

Burmese literature The literature of Burma (or Myanmar) spans over a millennium. Burmese literature was historically influenced by Indian and Thai cultures, as seen in many works, such as the ''Ramayana''. The Burmese language, unlike other Southeast Asian langu ...

Cambodian literature Cambodian literature ( km, អក្សរសាស្ត្រខ្មែរ, ), also Khmer literature, has a very ancient origin. Like most Southeast Asian national literatures its traditional corpus has two distinct aspects or levels: *The ...

** Laotian literature **

Singaporean literature The literature of Singapore comprises a collection of literary works by Singaporeans. It is written chiefly in the country's four official languages: English, Malay, Standard Mandarin and Tamil. While Singaporean literary works may be considered ...

Vietnamese literature Vietnamese literature ( vi, Văn học Việt Nam; chữ Nôm: 文學越南) is the literature, both oral and written, created largely by the Vietnamese. Early Vietnamese literature has been greatly influenced by Chinese literature. As Literary Chin ...

*Central Asian literature **

Kazakh literature Kazakh literature is defined as 'the body of literature, both oral and written, produced in the Kazakh language by the Kazakh people of Central Asia'. Kazakh literature expands from the current territory of Kazakhstan, also including the era of Ka ...

Tajik literature Tajik literature and its history is bound up with the standardisation of the Tajik language. Tajik literary centres include the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, currently in present-day Uzbekistan but with a majority Tajik population and Balkh and ...

Uzbek literature Uzbek literature refers to the literature produced and developed in the Republic of Uzbekistan with additional literary works contributed by the other parts of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan people of Central Asia. Influenced by the Russia ...

Kyrgyz literature The history of Kyrgyz literature dates to the early 19th century, from the poems of Moldo Nïyaz to stories written in "Old Kyrgyz". It is an important facet of the culture of Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz literature is not only written, but also spoken, and ...

*West Asian literature **

Persian literature Persian literature ( fa, ادبیات فارسی, Adabiyâte fârsi, ) comprises oral compositions and written texts in the Persian language and is one of the world's oldest literatures. It spans over two-and-a-half millennia. Its sources h ...

Arabic literature Arabic literature ( ar, الأدب العربي / ALA-LC: ''al-Adab al-‘Arabī'') is the writing, both as prose and poetry, produced by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is '' Adab'', which is derived from ...

Jewish literature Jewish literature includes works written by Jews on Jewish themes, literary works written in Jewish languages on various themes, and literary works in any language written by Jewish writers. Ancient Jewish literature includes Biblical literature a ...

Turkish literature Turkish literature ( tr, Türk edebiyatı) comprises oral compositions and written texts in Turkic languages. The Ottoman and Azerbaijani forms of Turkish, which forms the basis of much of the written corpus, were highly influenced by Persian a ...

Classical Indian literature

Classical Chinese and Japanese literature

Tang Tang or TANG most often refers to: * Tang dynasty * Tang (drink mix) Tang or TANG may also refer to: Chinese states and dynasties * Jin (Chinese state) (11th century – 376 BC), a state during the Spring and Autumn period, called Tang (唐) b ...

and

Song dynasty The Song dynasty (; ; 960–1279) was an imperial dynasty of China that began in 960 and lasted until 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song following his usurpation of the throne of the Later Zhou. The Song conquered the rest ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, famous

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

s such as

Li Bai Li Bai (, 701–762), also pronounced as Li Bo, courtesy name Taibai (), was a Chinese poet, acclaimed from his own time to the present as a brilliant and romantic figure who took traditional poetic forms to new heights. He and his friend Du F ...

authored works of great importance. They wrote ''shī'' (

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...

: 詩) poems, which have lines with equal numbers of

characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

, as well as ''cí'' (詞) poems with mixed line varieties. Early-Modern Japanese literature (17th–19th centuries) developed comparable innovations such as

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

, a form of Japanese poetry that evolved from the ancient ''

hokku is the opening stanza of a Japanese orthodox collaborative linked poem, '' renga'', or of its later derivative, '' renku'' (''haikai no renga''). From the time of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), the ''hokku'' began to appear as an independent poem, ...

'' (

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ma ...

: 発句) mode. Haiku consists of three sections (all in a single vertical line in Japanese): the first and third segments each have five ''morae'' (which are not the

phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

equivalent of

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

s), while the second has seven. Original haiku masters included such figures as

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

poet

Matsuo Bashō born then was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Bashō was recognized for his works in the collaborative '' haikai no renga'' form; today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognized as the greatest ma ...

(松尾芭蕉); others influenced by Bashō include

Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest of the Jōdo Shinshū. He is known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply , a pen name meaning Cup-of-teaBostok 2004. (lit. "one up oftea"). He is regarded as one of the four ...

and

Masaoka Shiki , pen-name of Masaoka Noboru (正岡升), was a Japanese poet, author, and literary critic in Meiji period Japan. Shiki is regarded as a major figure in the development of modern haiku poetry, credited with writing nearly 20,000 stanzas during ...

Classical West Asian literature

Modern Asian literature

The

polymath A polymath ( el, πολυμαθής, , "having learned much"; la, homo universalis, "universal human") is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific pro ...

Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore (; bn, রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He resh ...

, a

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

drama Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...

tist, and

writer A writer is a person who uses written words in different writing styles and techniques to communicate ideas. Writers produce different forms of literary art and creative writing such as novels, short stories, books, poetry, travelogues, p ...

who was an

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

n, became in 1913 the first Asian Nobel laureate. He won his

Nobel Prize in Literature ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , caption = , awarded_for = Outstanding contributions in literature , presenter = Swedish Academy , holder = Annie Ernaux (2022) , location = Stockholm, Sweden , year = 1901 , ...

for notable impact his prose works and poetic thought had on

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

, French, and other national literatures of

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

and the

Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. Along with th ...

. He also wrote the Indian anthem. Later, other Asian writers won Nobel Prizes in literature, including

Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal a ...

(

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

, 1966), and

Kenzaburō Ōe is a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues, i ...

(

, 1994).

wrote novels and short stories distinguished by their elegant and spartan diction such as the novels

Snow Country is a novel by the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata. The novel is considered a classic work of Japanese literature and was among the three novels the Nobel Committee cited in 1968, when Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Writ ...

and The Master of Go.

Examples

Classical Indian literature

Classical Chinese and Japanese literature

Classical West Asian literature

Modern Asian literature

See also