The making of a Chinese critical system : Liu Xie's Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin Diaolong)

Liu Xie's Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong) is often hailed as the most systematic work of literary criticism in premodern China – unrivaled both in its scope and in the richness of its insights. This chapter presents a critical introduction to Liu's comprehensive expositions on literature in this masterpiece. After a brief account of the macrocosmic specificity of Western and Chinese critical systems and the overall structure of the Literary Mind, it examines Liu's self‐conscious endeavor to construct a grand Chinese critical system as it traces Liu's thinking on the origins and nature of literature, genre classification, the creative and receptive processes, tradition and individual talent, rhetoric and compositional principles, as well as general literary history. The chapter ends with a survey on scholarship on the Literary Mind in East Asia and the English‐speaking world.