Near East and Asia
This unit introduces literary works from the Near East and Asia from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the period that coincides with the “Age of Reason” or the Enlightenment era in Europe. The Enlightenment era refers to a phase in European intellectual history, so the characteristics of the literature from non-European regions manifest somewhat differently from their European counterparts. However, at the same time, we can still find traits in the literature of the Near East and Asia around this time that are comparable to, or correspond to, those of the literature produced in the immediate context of the Enlightenment. Especially, Evliya Celebi’s work in this chapter, produced from a region that was at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, may show many productive sites of cultural comparison and mixing. Although the term “Near East” has been largely replaced by “Middle East,” Western geographers in the past used it to refer to a region generally corresponding to the Ottoman Empire. In that sense, the term may prove useful for describing Evliya Celebi’s Book of Travels, which chronicles the territories of the Ottoman Empire and its neighboring regions.
The selections in this chapter, though written in different cultural contexts, invite many points of comparison. Stylistically and thematically, they all show a mixture of realism and fantasy as well as a mixture of realism and spirituality. Some of the fantastical elements (as in The Song of Chunhyang) may stem from the work’s oral literary origin, and some of them may come from spiritual and religious components in the works. Religion may have also simply set the tone for the whole work (as in The Narrow Road to the Deep North with its meditative prose and haiku). Islam in Book of Travels, Shamanism, Daoism, and Confucianism in The Song of Chunhyang, Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism in The Story of the Stone, and Zen Buddhism in The Narrow Road to the Deep North all play crucial roles in the works. Further, all of the selections reveal valuable details of the society in which the works are set: the Ottoman Empire in Book of Travels, the Tokugawa (or Edo) period in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Qing dynasty in The Story of the Stone, and the Joseon dynasty in The Song of Chunhyang. In addition, Book of Travels and The Narrow Road to the Deep North invite comparison as works of travel literature. Many of these works also reveal a growing sense of social justice and/or a recognition of the fundamental equality of humans despite class systems—ideas that were also important to Europe’s Enlightenment-era thinkers and writers.
Written by Kyounghye Kwon
