SOURCE: Holzman, Donald. “Confucius and Ancient Chinese Literary Criticism.” In Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, edited by Adele Austin Rickett, pp. 21-41. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978.

In the following essay, Holzman presents an analysis of Confucius as a literary critic.

I

Surely there is no more bookish civilization than China's, no civilization more prone to revere its ancient writings and to seek for guidance in its daily affairs within the pages of its traditional and even modern literature. And yet when we look into ancient Chinese writings to seek for general remarks about the nature of this literature—perhaps the broadest way of defining “literary criticism”—we come very near to being completely frustrated. Whole volumes have been consecrated to the study of what the ancient Greeks, and in particular Aristotle, wrote about literature, and their influence still persists. The historians of...