''The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons'' () is a 5th-century work on Chinese literary

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...

by Liu Xie, composed in fifty chapters (篇) according to the principles of numerology and divination found in the ''Book of Changes'' or ''

I Ching The ''I Ching'' or ''Yi Jing'' (, ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zho ...

''. The work also draws on and argues against the 3rd century author Lu Ji's work the

Wen fu ''Wen fu'' (), translated as "Essay on Literature", "The Poetic Exposition on Literature" or "Rhymeprose on Literature", is an important work in the history of fu poetry itself written in the Fu (poetry), Fu poetic form by the poet, general, and st ...

文賦 ("On Literature"). Liu Xie wished to give a complete and internally consistent account of literature. One of his ideas is that affections are the medium of literature, and language merely the product.

Translations

* *

References

* ''A Chinese literary mind: culture, creativity and rhetoric in Wenxin Diaolong'', 2001 (Zong-qi Cai, ed.). * Owen, Stephen. Readings in Chinese literary thought. No. 30. Harvard Univ Asia Center, 1992. * Richter, Antje
"Notions of Epistolarity in Liu Xie's ''Wenxin dialong.''"
''Journal of the American Oriental Society'' 127.2 (2007), pp. 143-160. * Zhao, Heping.
"Wen Xin Diao Long": An early Chinese rhetoric of written discourse.
' Purdue University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1990. 9301248.

External links

''Wen Xin Diao Long''
– Full text (traditional/UTF-8) from

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a Virtual volunteering, volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the ...

《文心雕龍》
– Chinese text in GB/Simplified characters from the website "Sinology," (國學).

Chinese text with (partial) matching English vocabulary (Chinese Notes Digital Library) Chinese classic texts 5th-century Chinese books Academic works about literary theory {{lit-book-stub