East Asia

Abstract

With its written language and culture, especially neo-Confucianism, exerting a significant influence in East Asia, China occupied a position of central importance, which led some scholars to call East Asia of that period a Sinosphere. The most important school in Late Ming literature is the Gong'an school, so named because the leading writers of this school, the three Yuan brothers, came from Gong'an, Hubei Province. Like poetry and prose, drama and fiction had a similar trajectory from decline at the early period of the Ming dynasty to gradual resuscitation in the Mid-Ming, and a vigorous development during the Late Ming period. Demanded by people in different social strata and thriving in imperial courts as well as the marketplaces of commoners, drama developed as a popular genre and reached a splendid height in the Late Ming period.