Indiana University Conference on Oriental-Western Literary Relations . Ed. Horst Frenz and G. L. Anderson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. xii, 241. $4.50.

Abstract

Indiana University Conference on Oriental-Western Literary Relations. Ed. HORST FRENZ and G. L. ANDERSON. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. xii, 241. $4.50. The increase of interest in the study of literatures outside the European tradition, one of the happier developments in the academic world of recent years, led to the conference held in 1954 at Indiana University on "Oriental-Western Literary Relations." The present volume, based on papers delivered at this conference, is a praiseworthy publication and deserves the support of persons professionally interested in any oriental literatures. "Oriental" is admittedly a vague term. As used here, it includes literature written all the way from southern Spain to Japan, leaving as "Western" only the westernmost fringes of the Eurasian continent and the (until recently) uncivilized wilderness of America. It is obvious from the geographical extent of the "Orient" that its neglect in the teaching given at most universities is indefensible; it is also clear that the common "Oriental" heritage of a poet in Seville or Fez with one in Kyoto or Peking cannot have been very close. And yet there is a meaning in giving in one volume so broad a survey of non-European literatures. One of the common problems of "Oriental" writers in recent years, as we can gather from this book, has been the adoption of the colloquial language in place of a formal written language. This problem has varied from country to country, but that it has been faced alike by writers in Egypt, Bengal, China, and Japan deserves our attention, and in itself suggests a reason why the literature of the "Orient" at points seems skimpy when compared with European literature. It surely comes as a shock when (p. 225) a scholar of Chinese literature informs us that only one "Chinese novel of importance" remains to be translated, the other six already existing in English versions. Are there then only seven novels of importance in Chinese literature? And, we may ask, are there even that many (until recently at least) in Japanese literature? And none at all before the twentieth century in Arabic literature? One is tempted to form the conclusion that the writing of novels requires a mastery of colloquial prose, such as was widely achieved in seventeenth-century Europe, but which in China and Japan was achieved only sporadically by individual masters.