Modern Chinese Literature and the Human Geography of East Asia

Abstract

In recent years, research on East Asia, including the China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and other countries and regions, is gradually valued by a group of young Chinese scholars. Eastern regions studies concentrate on how classical Chinese culture was popularized, absorbed and recreated in East Asia. The four East-Asian countries of China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea are geographical neighbors and mutually dependent upon each other. And in the past two thousand years, the neighbors, separated only by small bodies of water, have been communicating frequently with each other culturally, economically and politically by sea and by land. The Chinese characters that have been used for a long time and the thoughts, religion and literature transmitted through Chinese language constitute the so-called “Chinese Cultural Circle.”