Literature and the Training of Imperial Elites
The genre of the novel dominates the literary historiography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism and anti-colonialism. Franco Moretti, Edward Said, and Benedict Anderson examine the dominance of the novel after 1750, its amenability to both imperial and nationalist ideologies, its tie with newspapers as part of print capitalism, and the distinguishing features of its aesthetic form which enabled its rise to global dominance.[746] Cosmopolitan world languages such as English, French, and Spanish have been mainly carried by the novel in the modern age.
As a global form, the modern novel arose as a compromise between European formal influence, local materials, and local forms, with the encounter between these producing differently shaped texts in different regions.[747] Other literary genres continued to flourish, but as Bayly has emphasized, in the modern era novels and short stories embodied the sense of the nation and its essential characteristics. The reading matter of educated people across the world converged in style, while becoming more distant from traditions of popular literature, drama, music, and storytelling, which existed in most societies until the onset of mass television broadcasting in the later twentieth century.[748] However, in the ancient world forms of poetry were especially influential in the education of imperial elites. In ancient Rome, Greek and Latin poets had a prominent place in the curricula from the primary level through to the Grammaticus and Rhetoric schools. Pupils first studied Homer, and the Iliad and the Odyssey were pivotal in their education. After their initiation in Homer, they studied the Aeneid, which remained the Latin school text par excellence for centuries as the national epic that invited comparison with the Odyssey and Iliad.[749] It was the genre of the epic, then, which was of first importance in literary education. After the epic, pupils came to tragedy, which was seen as a suitable combination with the epic because of their perceived common basis in legend.[750] Latin and Greek odes were also studied, as were a range of prose writings.[751] The exegesis of texts involved teaching the basic tropes associated with the reading of the poets, and it was from the emulation of classical models and their teachers' corrections that pupils learned the details of style and composition.[752] Pupils also gained from a more rhetorical approach toward literature, focusing on structure, characterization, literary embellishment, and sententiae. This rhetorical training was crucial to effective public speaking and the acquisition of oratorical skill, both of which were highly prized under the Republic and then the Empire.[753]The focus of interest, then, in the Grammatici in both Greece and Rome was literature, and the main field of study was poetry.[754] Literature was also central to the way the ancient Romans presented themselves as a world power. By creating a literature of their own, that invited comparisons with the Greeks and expressed its differences from them, the Romans presented their achievements as unique and unprecedented. Cosmological perspectives and a sense of divine favor underpinned their notion of an imperial and civilizing mission.[755] The “supreme example of imperial poetry” which transformed the epic into a genre that was overtly political was Virgil's Aeneid.[756] This articulated a specific collective history and an idea ofworld domination, and as a celebration of Augustus's power it was tied to a system of monarchy. As Quint has argued, the Virgilian tradition of imperial domination is the defining tradition of the Western epic, and future epic poets seeking to articulate imperial values and missions would emulate it, while those opposed to imperialism or on its losing side would contest and resist it.[757] The Aeneid shaped an idea of history as linear teleology, linking disparate events across time in a meaningful narrative of imperial conquest.
In contrast, Lucan's (39-65 ce) Pharsalia, “the epic of the lost Roman Republic,”[758] inaugurated the tradition of the epic of the defeated. Quint outlines how anti-imperial poets would imitate Lucan's model, forming an alternative tradition within epic poetry that created its own continuity as a mirror of the Virgilian tradition it sought to displace.[759] This tradition included Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana (1569-1589) on the violent conquest of Chile and Agrippa d'Aubigne's Les Tragiques (1616) on the Huguenot resistance during the wars of religion in Europe.[760]In the bureaucracy of pre-modern China, literature had a key role in the training of the imperial elite. During the Han Dynasty (202 bce-220 ce), Confucians entered officialdom through a state college and competitive examination system. Young men of means and ability in pre-modern China aspired to succeed in the civil service examinations, with the pinnacle of achievement being the jinshi degree, current from the seventh century onward. This certified that the candidate had mastered the sinographic script and could write literary compositions in it.[761] Central to the education of the imperial elite was the “doctrine of the literati” (rujiao) and the ethos of wen signifying both writing (literature, belles-lettres) and culture.[762] From the first century bce the Confucian Five Classics were the main object of study for the educated elite. This included the Classic of Odes, an anthology of approximately 300 poems, consisting mainly of ceremonial hymns and folk songs, some of which celebrated ideal models of governance and the perceived moral order holding the Chinese empire together.[763] It was Kong Qiu/Confucius (551479 bce) who framed this body of ancient literature, gearing it toward the political, moral, and cosmic dimensions of imperial governance.[764] He also outlined how the styles and manners of the noble person, strategies of good rule, and personal cultivation combined with each other to form an imperial ethos of culture and civilization.
Confucius was partly responding to what he saw as the crisis of civilization caused by the decline of the Zhou dynasty in the mid-sixth century bce. Similarly, Dong Zhongshu's (195?-105? bce) focus on renewed kingship during the Warring States and Han period underpinned his interpretations of the Confucian texts, and enabled him and other scholars under Emperor Wu (r. 141-87 bce) to establish a text-based ideology grounded in the canonization of the Confucian texts, which was to play a major role in the doctrinal and political life of the state. The designation of the official posts known as the “Erudites of the Five Classics” and the foundation in 124 bce of the Imperial College where these texts were taught further institutionalized this canon. Confucianism was thus the philosophy of scholarofficials, and it reflected how the literati were indispensable to imperial governance as men who were trained to handle the edicts, regulations, and documents necessary to the smooth running of a centralized government.[765]While the exact place of poetry and belles-lettres in the Chinese imperial civil service curriculum and examinations fluctuated over this long period of time, literary composition, a command over the different styles of poetry, essay writing, and prose, and penmanship remained crucial. The emphasis on calligraphic excellence reflected the role of the writing system in China as a powerful instrument of bureaucracy and the importance of fine writing in its operation.[766] During the Sui dynasty (581-618 ce) literary composition became a key feature of the civil service examinations. In the Tang period (618-906 ce) the test essays for “advanced scholars” included bureaucratic and poetic writings, but by the mideighth century the third part of the test consisted exclusively of composing poetic writings. During the reign of the first two emperors of the Tang period, 618-649, literary anthologies, legal texts, and classical learning were codified.
The literary anthology Wen Xuan compiled by Xiao Tong (501-531 ce), consisting of more than 700 literary pieces, ranging from poems to prose, funeral essays, and correspondence, defined belles-lettres as a category of knowledge. This anthology and commentaries on it, together with Literary material by category, attributed to Ouyang Xun (557-641 ce, issued in 624), became especially important for the education of the imperial elite and the state civil service examinations.[767] Students consulted the Wen Xuan as the primary work on literary styles, and its importance in preparing candidates is borne out by the many references to it in relation to the exams. It reinforced the role of literary skills at a time when the exams laid stress on poetic writings for the advanced scholar degree, and the anthology remained popular throughout the Tang and Song periods.[768] While by the thirteenth century the great age of poetry in the exams had declined, the exams continued to stress the proper use of couplets, the importance of form, and different styles and modes of argumentation. Candidates were expected to employ stylized arguments at designated places in their essays, with eight pairs of paragraphs echoing each other—this evolved into the so-called eight-legged essays in the Ming and Qing examinations, and it held sway as the standard form of exam answer from the mid-fifteenth century until the demise of the entire system in the early twentieth century.[769] Belles-lettres and penmanship, then, remained an important part of the imperial elite's sense of civilization and governance, irrespective of the exact place that poetry played in the exams.The connections between notions of civilization, writing, polite literature, and imperial governance were also evident in other empires. The expansion of Arabian peninsular forces over a wide area in the seventh century brought Islam into contact with a variety of cultures, and in 697, during the reign of the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik, Arabic was designated as the official language of administration, replacing the Greek and Persian of the numerous functionaries who continued to work in many areas of the caliph's chancery.
During this period a class of bureaucrats speaking and writing Arabic began to administer the affairs of the caliphate. As the functions of this class of administrators, secretaries, and scribes grew in complexity, they developed codes of conduct and models of style that facilitated the transfer and exchange of information, ideas, and goods at various levels of authority within the Islamic dominions. As Roger Allen has argued, in this era of new cultural complexities the emergence of adab, encompassing belles-lettres, penmanship, and social etiquette, reflected the educational needs and cultural tastes of the urbane class of kuttab or secretaries in chancelleries (see also Marsham, chap. 22 in vol. 2).[770]Writers and secretaries from a Persian cultural background made a significant contribution to the development of adab. After the Arab conquest of Iran in 651, the cultural heritage of the Sasanian Empire and the religious value of the text of the Quran in Islamic civilization merged to secure the status of the literate class of the Persianate world, most of whom were professional administrators.[771] Within a century of the Arab-Islamic conquest, Persian (now in the Arabic script) resumed its administrative role, incorporating an extensive Arabic-Islamic vo- cabulary.[772] By the ninth century, New Persian supplanted Arabic, reducing it to a status in the Persianate world comparable to Latin in later medieval Europe. From this time until the nineteenth century, Persian was the high language of culture over a vast area of Eurasia, spanning the Iranian plateau from the South Caucasus to the Indus, Central Asia from Khiva to Kashgar, and the northern Indian subcontinent.[773] Epistles in Arabic of the “Mirror of Princes” genre also reflected a mixture of Arabic and Persian cultural influences, as in the case of the manuals written by ‘Abd al-Hamid ‘al-Katib (d. 750) and Ruzbih (d. 757).[774] In the Persianate world, adab was honed as a behavioral model for public interaction and a literary model of correct usage, infused with pre-Islamic influences and memories of the Sasanian class system.[775] Both secretaries and poets contributed to the development of courtly and formal Persian in the medieval period. A number of prominent secretaries wrote poetry, and some manuals for secretaries, such as the mid-fourteenth-century manual by Hindushah Nakhjavani, included a section on what poets and writers of the past had said about the tools of writing. Both secretaries and poets also wrote manuals of prosody.[776] The role of munshis as secretaries and professional writers highlights the close relation between governance and fine writing. The word munshi derives from an Arabic root meaning to compose something in writing, and munshis were writers of insha, that is, belletristic writings that covered prose composition, letters, documents, state papers, manuals of prosody, mirrors for princes, and books of ethics.[777] Secretaries developed prose styles to meet the diplomatic and administrative needs of government; writing a good hand, correctness of reference and address, line length, spacing, and the correct folding of documents were all important and were covered in manuals.[778] A significant factor in the spread of Persian as a koine was its secular character. While the Quran ultimately provided authority for Arabic usage, there was no such primary text for Persian.[779] When Islam replaced Zoroastrianism and Arabic replaced Pahlavi as a scriptural and liturgical language, the Iranian vernacular Dari, which was free from religious associations, became the domain of literature in Iran. In part, this explains the inclusivity of the Persianate linguistic and cultural world.[780] The achievement of Ferdowsi's epic Shahnama (ca. 1010) as a secular celebration of Persianness and the expression of a royal and heroic tradition of a pre-Islamic Iranian legend also played a key role in this inclusivity, as well as in determining the role of written Persian.[781]