The Research On Yin Zhu And His Prose

Yin Zhu was an important politician,litterateur and historian in the early Northern Song Dynasty.As an advocate of Northern Song ancient prose movement,he was making indelible impact on Ouyang Xiu’s prose creation and becoming a necessary part of Northern Song ancient prose movement by his massive ancient prose writing practices.However,due to Yin Zhu’s lack of talent and some limitations on his prose,his prose cannot be widely accepted and approved in later generations.The current research on Yin Zhu ’prose is far from enough.Therefore,this paper attempts to make an objective and comprehensive research on Yin Zhu ’s prose,so as to figure out the problems precisely which associate with Yin Zhu’s prose creation.This paper is made up of four parts.The first chapter analyzes the objective conditions and subjective factors of Yin Zhu’s prose creation,called external study,which adopts the conceptual terms in Rene Wellek’s Theory of Literature.Objective conditions mainly refer to the situation of politics,economy and culture in the period of Ren Zong reign,including the domestic trouble and foreign invasion,great emphasis on office politicians,the politic measures of the reform on imperial examination and preferential treatment to imperial censors,the rise of ancient prose during the early period of Song dynasty and the revival of Confucianism,which affect Yin Zhu a lot who born and grew up in the period of Ren Zong reign.Subjective factors mainly include his career experience,his brave character and habit of making comments.From both external and internal conditions,this paper tries to objectively figure out the motivation of Yin Zhu’s prose creation.The second chapter is a comprehensive analysis on the content of Yin Zhu ’s prose,especially the military content from his great number of military prose,including enhancing the border defense,improving the military regime and taking the attack strategies.As a litterateur,Yin Zhu also expressed his thoughts on literary.Therefore,the second section mainly discusses Yin Zhu’s thoughts of literary,including articles reflect the inner heart,advocating the concise article style,inclining to "Tao",which is divided into Confucian concept of state management and Confucian virtue and morality.As a historian,his prose can reveal his thoughts on history,including writing history with real pen and perceiving historic truth from details.The third chapter objectively evaluates Yin Zhu’s prose based on the artistic characteristics.Generally,I mainly summarize the style characteristics of his essays into three points.The first one is the diversity of demonstration method,including using history as evidence,comparative argument,analogy argument and rhetorical question.Secondly,his prose style is concise and ancient,which is much related to his large number of political prose,refined language and the use of straight forward style.In the end,the structure of his prose is strict and careful,most of which are arranged in a way,such as straight to the points,step by step in structure.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes the reasons that Yin Zhu’s prose cannot be widely accepted in later generations.This chapter explores the aesthetic standards of Chinese ancient prose and use it to judge Yin Zhu’s prose creation.First of all,Yin Zhu could not use parallel prose correctly,causing his no-beautiful,hard-understand and un-fluent writing style.Secondly,Yin Zhu’s literary talent is not enough and his prose hardly use virtual words like "Ye","Yi" and "Hu",so that his prose lack the beauty of emotion and rhyme.Thirdly,the structure of his reasoning prose is sometimes too flat and straight,and he is not good at using antithesis and rhetorical devices,such as parallelism and thimble,causing his prose lack a dynamic and majestic momentum.In the end,make a conclusion to this paper.On the one hand,we should confirm Yin Zhu’s achievements in writing ancient prose,on the other hand,we also need to face the limitations of his prose creation objectively.Only in this way,we can give his prose creation a reasonable judgment.