A Study Of Book Of Songs Criticism During The Manchu Reign

Poetics, long dormant under the Chinese literary landscape, went for an eruption starting the Manchu reign, experiencing the greatest thrust during the 1644-1840 revival, leaving repercussions felt as late as 1976. Taking such a resurrection as polemics for this dissertation against a social-cultural backdrop spanning 400 years, the author presents the major arguments through a quadruple structure featuring Introduction, Section One, Section Two, and Supplementary Argumentation.The Introduction offers the working methodologies adopted throughout this undertaking. The methodological economy, in substance, is the view of the Book of Songs in the Manchu times as a relived body poetic. Literature with its manifold representations brought into creative life within the focal literary history are then projected in three dimensions: an eco-survey as grounding, an psychic description as means, and typological analysis as perspective, so that a panoramic picture comes to the eye that looks to a myriads of poetic propositions.The 5-chapter long Section One begins with an overview of the development paths for pre-Manchu era poetics, followed by broad brush strokes about the accumulative poetic findings about the Book of Songs during the Manchu reign. Scholarly attention in this chapter falls on literature review with particular reference to masterpiece writings.Subjects under treatment for Chapter Two feature a combination of case studies( Sun Chengze, Lu Kuixun, and Yao Jiheng, ect.) and holistic arguments, to theeffect that the understanding is reached of the existence of both complementary andcontradictory propositions on Book of Song rhetorics during the formative years of thesaid revival.Qualities undergirding the poetics developed over the Qain-Jia part of the Manchu China history, as the author makes clear in Chapter Three, are ground-breaking achievements pertaining to Book of Songs scholarship on the one hand and, meticulous enterprises in the land of such scholarship's pragmatics on the other. Generally speaking, Han-scholarship and Song-scholarship interplayed with each other, producing both novel discoveries and fault-finding at the person behind the idea. Nevertheless, truth seeking dominated the scene, although, to be granted, while those in the corridors of power exhibited much borrowing from the kind of sage wisdom recorded in the Han or Song times, those politically disadvantaged displayed awesome individual person-born insights. Scholars receiving most attention for case study purposes here are Dai Zhen, Hui Dong, and Jiao Xun.Also a 2-part package as is the case of the previous chapter, Chapter Four has under its spotlight the transitional poetics under the Daoguang reign. Traditional Chinese poetics enjoyed its most magnificent and grandiose representation in this transitional stage. The Han-scholarship styled Book of Songs poetics in the Mao and-Zheng tradition reached it summit. Virtually, varied exegeses and commentaries on the Book of Songs were documented for a wider critical readership. Equally noteworthy, the conventions of Han scholarship and Song interpretative tradition were made more compatible to each other. And, not the least significant, Book of Song scholastics in the post-Han script charged forward with all might. Hu Chenghong, Chen Huan, and Chen Qiaozong, among others, merit, and truly do a full treatment for case analysis.Chapter Five traces the growth of Manchu era poetics against the background of parallel literary developments. Among its manifested signs is the tug of war between scholasticism and politics, encompassing the interplay between Han and Song scholarships, as well as that between ancient and modern script writings.The multiple representations of the Book of Songs emerging from a variety of literary genres during the Manchu reign are separately studied in Chapter Six. Specifically, literary allusions in the many different modes of poetry that surfaced to the so-called 300 poems arrest most heed of the author. To exemplify the gravity of these allusions, the author brings to the critical eye 10 poets known for their 4-character poems, an in-depth look into the intrusion of the 300 poems into whose creative artistry reveals, the first time ever, the deep impact these poems exercised, something also well attested to by the poetry composed by a well-known Korean female poet in Korea's Middle Dynasty period.After finishing Chapter Seven which is a vigorous attempts at a clarification of the relationship between poetics and literary theory over the Manchu times, the author closes the dissertation, in Chapter Eight, with a supplementary exploration into the critical achievements made by such early modern Book of Songs interpreters as Wei Yuan, Fang Yurun, and Wang Xianqian, as well as those contributed by turn-of-the-century scholars such as Liang Qichao, Wen Yiduo and Zhu ZiQing.