An Outline of Ancient Chinese Landscape Literature: With a Focus on the Significance of Su Shi’s Poetry in the History of Landscape Literature

Abstract

The concept of “landscape” has the attribute of self-sufficiency, and a series of sub-disciplines have formed around it. Landscape literature research is an inevitable interdisciplinary direction in the landscape discipline realm, with values independent from literary landscape research. Based on landscape writing, landscape literature takes landscapes as its starting point and focuses on examining the rich coupling relationship between scenery and observation, as well as the expressive experiences in it. In practice, ancient Chinese landscape literature takes traditional literary forms such as poetry and prose as its core. Ancient Chinese landscapes can be divided into four categories: natural landscapes (celestial phenomena, landforms, hydrological conditions, physical forms, etc.), social landscapes (cities, villages, markets, folk customs, etc.), historical landscapes (sites, temples, etc.), and human landscapes (architecture, gardens, skills, etc.). The creation of landscape literature in ancient China featured the integrated development of human, social, natural, and historical landscapes, which had become a magnificent sight by the Tang and Song dynasties. Landscape literature documents are often classified into the secondary level under the general catalogue of literary forms, and various encyclopedic works and classified collections also provide frame reference and text sources for landscape literature research. By comparing the poems of Su Shi 苏轼 in Southbound Journey Anthology 南行集 written by the “Three Sus,” namely Su Shi himself, his father Su Xun 苏洵, and his younger brother Su Zhe 苏辙, with his poems in Zhuangyuan Wang’s Classified Collection of Su Shi’s Poems with Annotations from Different Scholars 王状元集百家注分类东坡先生诗, this article reveals the important value of Su Shi from the perspective of landscape poetry

Keywords

literary landscape studies / landscape history / landscape poetry / Southbound Journey Anthology

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Higher Education Press