A Statement About The Literary Achievements Of Zhan Guo Ce

In the Warring States Period, the etiquette began to decay. The change of the era gave birth to many scholars, who, though lowly-born, went around to make preachments to emperors with their eloquence. Zhan Guo Ce is a literary work which records the speeches of these scholars. It has great literary merits with its concise narration, its fluent language, its persuasive argumentation, and its vivid description. Moreover, some parables are included in these speeches to make them more interesting. Its style and writing techniques are fine, too. In the past, many scholars have carried out studies on this great book discontinuously, but few have made careful study on its literary achievements.This paper, based on a thorough study of this book, mainly discusses some issues on its characterization and its language, which are rarely discussed before.This paper consists of three parts, namely the introduction, the main body and the conclusion:The introduction briefly introduces the background of this book, while making some basic studies on its compiler, its characteristics, and its different versions.Chapter one to chapter three is the main body of this thesis. It studies the literary achievements of this book from three angles:Chapter one studies the stylistic features of the book, and its different literary genres.Chapter two studies the art of characterization in this book, analyzing its inheritance to the predecessors and its innovation in characterization.Chapter three studies the language usage in this book from the perspective of aesthetics. It discusses this issue from three angles, including its beauty in eloquence, beauty in spirit, and beauty in form.The conclusion makes an evaluation on this book, and analyzes its influence to prose writing afterwards.