Literature
Vietnamese literature includes two major components: folk literature and written literature. The two forms developed simultaneously and are profoundly interrelated.
Vietnamese folk literature came into being very early and had a profound effect on the spiritual life of the Viet. The folk literature contributed to the formation of Vietnam's national identity with praising beauty, humanism, and the love of goodness. Legends, fairy tales, humorous stories, folk songs, epic poems have a tremendous vitality and have lived on until today.
Written literature was born roughly in the 10th century. Up until the 21th century, there had been two components existing at the same time: works written in the Han characters (with poems and prose demonstrating the Vietnamese soul and realities; thus, they were still regarded as Vietnamese literature) and works written in the Nom character (mostly poems; many great works were handed down to the later generations).
Since the 1920s, written literature has been mainly composed in the National language with profound renovations in form and category such as novels, new-style poems, short stories and dramas, and with diversity in artistic tendency. Written literature attained speedy development after the August Revolution, when it was directed by the Vietnamese Communist Party's guideline and focused on the people's fighting and work life.
Modern Vietnamese literature has developed from romanticism to realism, from heroism in wartime to all aspects of life, and soared into ordinary life to discover the genuine values of the Vietnamese people.
Classical literature generated such masterpieces as Truyen Kieu (Nguyễn Du), Cung Oán Ngâm Khúc (Nguyễn Gia Thiều), Chinh Phu Ngam (Dang Tran Con), and Quoc Am Thi Tap (Nguyễn Trãi). Some brilliant female poets are Hồ Xuân Hương, Doan Thi Diem, and Bà Huyện Thanh Quan.
In Vietnamese modern prose, there were authors who could emulate whomever in the world, namely, Nguyen Cong Hoan, Vu Trong Phung, Ngô Tất Tố, Nguyen Hong, Nguyen Tuan and Nam Cao. They were joined by excellent poets: Xuân Diệu, Huy Cận, Han Mac Tu, and Nguyen Binh. Regrettably, their great works that faithfully reflected the country and the times have yet to appear.
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Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and
metaphor.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)