Rethinking Literary Genre Theory: From a Chinese Perspective

Abstract Literary genre theory is one of the basic issues in the fields of literary theory and semiotic studies. This paper investigates literary genre theory through analyzing many data of ancient Chinese literary criticism, and provides a critical insight of literary genre. Literary genre essentially refers to the textual kind of literary production and consumption in a conventionalized communicative setting in order to express the original understanding of reality. In Chinese literary theory, "Ti" (体) roughly corresponds with literary genre. In the context of "unity of man with Heaven and Earth" ( 天人合一) , social function and personality are the main criteria of literary classification in ancient China. The original concept of literary genre was tied very tightly to the performances and events on specific social occasions in both the West and the East. The perspective of dynamic semiotics tends to highlight fluidity and open-endedness of the relation between texts and genres.