The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons

Liu Xie's fifty chapters begin from the claim that literary pattern is continuous with the patterning of the natural world, then move through the origins of writing in the classics, the characteristics of every recognised genre, and finally the craft questions of structure, imagery, sound, revision and the writer's temperament. It is analytic rather than anthological: where earlier criticism gathered admired examples, this asks what makes a form work and where writers of the past failed. It remains the central work of premodern Chinese literary theory.