Yang Xiong's Literary Conception

Studies on Yang Xiong's conception of literature show that his distinctive inclination of returning to the ancients and simulation and the relationship between Confucianism and Taoism in his mind are co-existent and interrelative. In the The History of Chinese Literary Criticism, Mr. Guo Shayu pointed out," In a word, he (Yang Xiong) clang to his position of returning to the ancients and following the classics. As a result, he tended to use ancient expressions and odd words and to imitate the classical forms." Guo's view is representative of the majority of Yang Xiong researchers. However, Gu Yisheng and Jiang Fan, in their co-authored The History of Literary Criticism in the Pre-Qin and the West and the East Han Ages, describe Yang Xiong's mode of literature as advocating the Tao, quoting the sages and adhering to the classics .Meanwhile ,the insist on the flexibility of this mode of his, thinking that Yang Xiong not only laid a foundation of the traditional literary conception of advocating the Tao ,quoting the sages and adhering to the classics, but also was able to further explore the nature-based Tao and the norm-free writing in terms of onto logy under the influence of Taoist conception of nature. Mr. Xu Jie, author of The History of Literary Ideology in the Han Dynasty, holds that Yang xiong had "a double-theme system of literary ideology." "The double major themes, adhering to the classics and quoting the sages as one and worshiping nature as the other, were contradictory and interactive in Yang Xiong's ideology of literature."The author of this paper thinks that ,whichever approach of analysis we apply in criticizing Yang Xiong's literary concept, such as "simulations", "return to the ancients" or "Taoism-characterized Confucianism", we cannot grasp the peculiarity but merely some extrinsic features of Yang Xiong's literary conception. Hence a limited validity .In fact, however, Yang Xiong's ideology was firmly based on consciousness of succession and transformation, and so was his literary conception. Having absorbed and drawn on the former results of study, the author attempts to make an overall analysis of Yang Xiong's literary conception, the peculiarity of which is quite beyond our understandingunless it is to be explored in terms of the complex society at the historical turing point between the Western and the Eastern Han Dynasty in which Yang Xiong lived and wrote.The political rule of the Late Western Han Dynasty was largely characteristic of the fact that,which the emperor power completely undermined, the political situation of the country was repeatedly varying that the rivalry for power between eunuchs and the emperor's maternal relatives became increasingly fierce that the state power kept changing hands between those two groups. The disorderly and turbulent political situation affected the society so seriously that common people lived in deeper and deeper misery. Ideologically, what accounted for all this was none other but Confucianism as the ruler's ideology of administration in the Han Dynasty and throughout the whole of feudal society in China, which was established on the basis of Dong Zhongshu's doctrine of induction between Heaven and Man and Gong Yang xue's thought. Confucian theory benefited scholars utilitarianly every way and helped theologize, vulgarize and uglify the academic character of the Han scholars. With the increasing raise of Confucianist position, the involved approach of interpreting the classics and superstitions theologization dominated the ideological world of the Late Western Han Dynasty .Moreover, in the reign of Emperors of Ai and Ping ,mystical divination arose to add to the theologizing tendency in the classics, shrouding the ideological world of the Late Western Han Dynasty with mysticism and irrationalism.It was just in this atmosphere of mystical and irrational ideology that Yang Xiong as a marginal sage, who had nothing to do with the atmosphere, came into the science, which showed his avoidance of the phenomenon. As an "intellectual" scholar,...