A Comparative Study Of Liu Xie And Wordsworth’s Literary Imagination

Literary imagination has always been the core category of literary and artistic thinking.The literary imagination is ambiguous and confused in its interpretation and understanding due to the diversity,complexity and multiplicity of thought forms.In the light of the development of Chinese and Western literary theory,it is useful to explore the similarities and differences between Liu’s theory of "divine thinking" and Wordsworth’s theory of imagination,in order to further explore and clarify the meaning of literary imagination.Conversely,it helps to sort out and summarize the sources of the Chinese and Western literary imagination and their meanings.The main elements of this paper include a background to the introductory section and the basis for its argument.The first part presents the overall composition of Wordsworth’s and Liu’s views on the imagination;the second part provides an introduction to the relationship between the intrinsic elements of the two.The third and fourth sections compare and discuss the similarities and differences between Wordsworth’s and Liu’s views on the literary imagination.In the fifth part the author summarizes the relevant nature and characteristics of the literary imaginary view and its aesthetic function,based on the overall dimension of comparative poetics.It is therefore useful to focus on the core category of literary imagination in the literature of Chinese and Western studies of Liu and Wordsworth’s view of literary imagination,in order to sort out the historical evolution of Liu and Wordsworth’s view of literary imagination in detail.Through parallel comparisons,we identify the differences in cultural backgrounds and social patterns between the East and the West,and then explore the multi-dimensional beauty of the literary imagination in the context of East-West comparisons.Among them,the similarities and differences between Liu Xie and Wordsworth’s views on literary imagination are shown in the following aspects:On the whole,Wordsworth and Liu’s literary imagination have the form of "Four-in-one" and "Three elements generate each other".The former’s view of the literary imagination consists of a trigonal pyramid structure of imagination,nature,sentiment and language,which are interrelated and significantly intertwined in nature.The multifaceted contradictions of industrial society prompt the poet to seek out nature,to nurture the childlike innocence,to celebrate sympathy,and thus to express the empathetic imagination of man and man,man and the world,in a fresh,simple and well-worded language.The latter’s view of the literary imagination consists of a dynamic spherical model composed of three elements: emotion,will and reason.This model is responsible for the mutual generation of the ’real world’ and the ’regenerated world’,the’possible world’ and the ’necessary world’.In the pragmatism of agrarian civilization,the collision and fusion of Confucianism,Buddhism and Taoism,symbols are obtained from objects and then transcend this symbol towards a generative imaginative form of thought that unifies the divine and the shapely.To achieve this goal,the poetic perception of mind and object,emotion and scene,needs to be expressed by means of condensed words,subtle structures and phonetically harmonious language.Based on a concrete comparison between Liu Xie and Wordsworth’s view of the literary imagination,this thesis draws on the basic principles of process philosophy to reconstruct a categorical model of thought,and then breaks down the principle of binary classification to create a new "intrinsically diffuse" categorical dimension of thought as a whole.In summary,literary thinking is not a vertically structured unit of thought,but a collection of thoughts with a variety of properties,including figurative thinking,logical thinking,and different states of thought such as imagination,fantasy and inspiration.The literary imagination,on the other hand,is characteristics by the nature of a dynamically operating system and by inward vision,freedom and originality,as well as the aesthetic function of transience,ego lessness and cumulative expression.