Lucretius, Liu Xie 劉勰, and Literature

Those visitors who are interested in comparative approaches to creativity may be interested in the paper that I have just had published over in the excellent Taiwanese journal, NTU studies in Language and Literature. The paper is about different models of literary creativity in Liu Xie’s early 6th century Wenxin Diaolong (文心雕龍) and Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. I’ve long been frustrated by the odd claim—made by a surprising number of scholars—that there is something inherently uncreative about Chinese approaches to literature, and so this is to some extent an answer to this, as well as an attempt to set out a more modest and universal notion of what it might mean to create literary works.

You can find a link to the article here: Participation, Pattern and Change: Literary Creation in Liu Xie and Lucretius