A Study Of Cao Zhi 's Poems

In the contemporary field of ancient Chinese literature study, the traditional research on the individual writer’s works had gradually eclipsed. The main research monographs on the individual writer even like Cao Zhi, who was one of the most important writers in Jian’an Period and History of Chinese Literature, also mostly mustered in the period from1920s to1990s. These studies mainly focused on two areas:one is proofing texts and compiling the materials, the other is studying Cao Zhi’s compositions. When studying Cao Zhi, the overseas Sinology came into being a kind of paradigm away from discussing poetry based on studying the author’s whole life and morality. So they studied his works only according to his works. My question is why so many scholars from antiquity to present day attempted to interpret Cao Zhi’s compositions again and again and why his compositions had such a lasting attraction.So this dissertation is based on the attempt to go back to texts and languages. Chapter1, which is the foundation of the discussion, is about studying the version of Cao Zhi’s corpus. Cao Zhi has so many poems and rhapsodies, some of which were classified ambiguously because of loss of corpus. What’s more, different editions of the anthology have appeared in the process of dissemination, resulting in text discrepancies and research difficulties. So we must get to the bottom of the origin of these versions and survey the spread of Cao Zhi’s corpus, which is the precondition and foundation of studying his corpus. Chapter1first examined the catalogue in history, local gazetteer, official and private bibliography and made clear the status of its compilation and prevalence in the history. Subsequently it explored and compared the different versions, which were collected in major libraries, and then confirmed the time of different versions and distinguished between the true and false versions. It also examined the close relationship between a few kinds of important versions, such as the only printed version in Ningzong of Southern Sung, and some important literary collections like Wenxuan, Yuefu shiji, Yiwen leiju and Taiping yulan. On this basis it elucidated the relationship in succession between the Sung versions and Ming versions. Therefore this work laid the foundation for the further discussion.The chapter2-4is the detail study on Cao Zhi’s poetry. The chapter2explored the different themes of Cao Zhi’s poems like symposium poems, reciprocal poems, poems about immortals and women poems. It attempted to put Cao Zhi’s poems in the history of different types of Chinese poems to explore his succession and development from the former poems. Chapter3and4focused on the microcosmic study, and explored the languages, imago, forms, phraseologies, rhythm, symmetry, structure and inner laws of development of Cao Zhi’s poems.Chapter5and6mainly studied Cao Zhi’s rhapsodies. Like the poems, chapter5explored Cao Zhi’s rhapsodies from the aspect of theme classification. It classified these themes into three sorts:tour, character and chanting things. On the basis it made the texts analysis. Chapter6carefully explored the language of Cao Zhi’s rhapsodies. It examined all kinds of usage of languages and words in Cao Zhi’s rhapsodies like verbs, particles, proverbs and lyrics from the aspects of phraseology and syntax.