Literary Analysis Of Qu Yuan's Chapter Of Epichoric Literature

Beecroft opens his chapter of epichoric literature with the declaration “my conception of the epichoric is designed explicitly to provide [that] limit case” 1. By “limit” he is referring to the nature of literature that is produced and circulated within a “single, small-scale, political and/or cultural context” 2, impenetrable to mainstream literary influence and vice versa. As it might often happen to one who is trying to bring under sophisticatedly designed categorizations phenomenon that does not grow sorted by type, it sometimes occurs to Beecroft that he falls short of providing the most felicitous and compelling examples to feed his carefully drafted ideology. To illustrate my point I will center on the Chinese example, namely the Chu poetry written by the semi-legendary poet Qu Yuan 屈原, that he drew to augment the argument of the nature of epichoric

But is Qu Yuan’s poetry such a case? In line with Beecroft’s analysis it seems that the reason he chooses this particular poetic pieces is because the poet who speaks a Chu language/dialect in some extent different from the dominating language writes it used by the Huaxia people, although to which extent it is Sinicized is difficult to tell. He also talks about how it bears traces of discrepancy between that of the original Chu’s local shamanic tradition and possible later conformance to the Confucian moral oriented mythological idealism, but it is out of this short paper’s purview to discuss extensively on this aspect. It’s true that Chu dialect boasts of a linguistic and literary distinctiveness from the Huaxia language, but not so pronounced as to be treated separately as the language of a culture completely out of the realm of the Huaxia culture. Beecroft mentions how Chu poetry, which typically uses five-syllable line, differs in formal aspects from the usual four-syllable lined Canon of Songs 4, but nonconformity in mere syntactic structure does not denote nonconformity in