North Song Shuxin Study

This thesis mainly discusses personal letters in Song Dynasty, which doesn't include those letters to the emperor from the minister and official documents. We divide the thesis into nine chapters. In foreword, we introduce the relative previous study and our research aim, thought and something else. In appendix, we list the letters in North Song. In chapter 1, we comb the historical origin and evolution of kinds of letters, especially the development of North Song among the entire history of letters. Chapter 2 includes three parts, one is amount statistics, one is to confirm the value of those extent letters, third is to probe into the condition of collecting into published books. The kind of books can classify into two categories. One is to provide the official model of letters with the literati, the other is the collections of ordinary letters. Chapter 4 tells us the guideline of writing letters. Chapter 5 is to study the rules of the letters in North Song. According to three family letters from Ou Yangxiu欧阳修, we try to study the mood when he was the charge of Bo county亳州. In chapter 7, we probe into the thought of Su Xun苏洵when he asked for officer, and in chapter 8, we study the contact between Ou Yangxiu and Mei Yaochen梅尧臣. In the last chapter, we compare the letters of Su Shi苏轼and Huang Tingjian黄庭坚.