The Comparison Of Xunzi And Hanfeizi’s Literary Concept And Literary Characteristic

Both of Xunzi and Han Feizi represent the highest achievements of traditional Chinese prose in Late Warring States. Xunzi was very knowledgeable and once served as the Jijiu of Ji Xia Academy in Qi. He wrote books in his later years in Lanling, inheriting and promoting the Confucianism. Han Feizi was under the tutelage of Xunzi in his early years. Stuttering, not oratorical but excellent in writing books, he was the representative of the Legalism. This essay compared two books—Xunzi and Han Feizi—mainly to explore the similarities and differences between their concepts and characteristics. The essay consists of four parts:The Introduction refers to the status quo of the comparative studies on Xunzi and Han Feizi, articulating the difficulties and innovations of this article, and briefly states the research methods.Chapter1illustrates the similarities and differences between the viewpoints of Xunzi and Han Feizi, by comparing the concepts of Bian, Shuo, Yue from the two books to demonstrate their common practical aesthetic pursuit.Chapter2compares the argumentation of Xunzi and Han Feizi. It analyzes from three different aspects:the text structure, the option of arguments and the argumentation approach. For text structures, the two books both open articles with conclusive titles, and then debate in general logistics or paralleled ways, combining argumentation and refutation. For the option of arguments, they both start with common sense followed by large number of references to historical stories and old sayings, while exhibiting different characters in the specific argumentation. For the argumentation approach, it compared the four different approaches of argumentation in the two books-the deductive, inductive, analogical and comparative reasoning, which was derived from the logical concepts.Chapter3compares the rhetorical devices of Xunzi and Han Feizi. It discusses the use of four rhetorical devices in the two books, the metaphor, antithesis, parallelism and anadiplosis. Referring to metaphor, it analyzed their different choose of metaphor vehicles and the phenomenon of "metaphor of two handles", also the lay-style way of metaphor in two books. Referring to antithesis, it mainly looks for the same point in using the rhetoric and also the combination of antithesis and other rhetoric. Referring to parallelism, it compared the different ways of using parallelism in the two books to demonstrate their diversity in styles. In terms of anadiplosis, it mainly discussed the role of anadiplosis in the two books.Generally speaking, this paper is a comparative study on the concepts and characteristics of Xunzi and Han Feizi, based on meticulous interpretation of original texts and the results of former studies.