A Study Of The Qing Scholars' Anthologies Of The Qing Poems

Anthology of poetry, the study of poetry anthology is of great significance, for it is closely related to poetics, schools of poetry, poetry creation and poets. Therefore, The dissertation, starting with the statistical analysis of over 240 poetry anthologies the present author has read and of related books and data obtained from the investigation of over 800 collections of the Qing poems, gives a broad overview of the collected Qing verses by summarizing their features. Meanwhile, the relationship of the Qing poetry anthology to poetry criticism and poetic composition has also been examined. Besides, the paper, by employing relevant theories of poetics (e.g. geographical poetics and genres of poetics), deals, based on case studies of representative collections, with such poetic concepts as style, the Song poetics, history of poetry, etc. represented by the Qing poem collections. Which is also given in the paper to schools of the Qing poetry creation, regional cultures, mentalities of literary intelligentsia, and cultural practices.Introduction presents a conception of categorization, status quo and methodology as the basis of this study. Chapter I outlines the basic features and types of the Qing poems collections that the Qing scholars compiled and analyzes the reasons that they flourished. Chapter II sums up, according to the process of anthologizing and the collected works, their features of collectivity, regionality and politics. Moreover, it is inevitable that the anthologizing of the Qing poems was influenced by the anthologists'aesthetic taste and poetic concept, namely, their understanding of and attitudes toward such issues as nature, function, form, genre and model of the Qing poetry. Hence Chapter III analyzes the views that the Qing students held on the criticism of the Qing poetry anthologies, and examines varieties of poetics represented by the anthologies'prefaces, postscripts and introductory notes, together with the relationship between the comments on and dissemination of them and poetics, followed by the detailed discussion in the sections over the notions of style, the Song poetics and poetry history.Chapter IV is designed to examine the relationship of the anthology of the Qing poems and the creation of poetry before reaching an agreement through the discussion that the Qing poets had fully realized the driving force that anthology imposed upon creation, followed by an analysis of Collected Rimed Verses of Entrance Examination to Tongwenguan which explores the guiding function that the anthologies of the Qing poems assumed in the writing as well as a case study of Collected Poems of Forty Poets during the Late Qing in which the assumption that the anthologies are collections of the techniques for poetic composition has been ascertained.Chapter V, based on the analysis of the sentiment-oriented poetics represented by Xian Wanchun's Collected Verses of Three Scholars of Songjiang House and Wu Weiye's Anthology of Poems of Ten Scholars from Taicang, points out that the poetics, making up for the deficiencies in the school of style in the Ming Dynasty, initiated a new thinking on the style of the Qing poetry. And Shen Deqian's Selected Poems of the Qing Dynasty manifests a poetics directed at motif, nature and romantic charm, which highlights the connotations of the theory of style by integrating gentle and kind outlook on poetry education with style, followed by Wang Chang's Commentaries on Poems across the Country and Fu Senbao's Anthology of the Qing Verses, which both inherit the former theories of literary style and stress the influence that knowledge exerts upon poetic creation, hence showing their trend in the Tang and Song poetics.Chapter VI presents an analysis of Anthology of My Favorite Poems compiled respectively by Qian Qianyi, in the early Qing Dynasty, which reflect a poetics that neither models itself solely on poetry writing in the bloom of the Tang Dynasty, nor pays no regard to the Song poetics, and hence is of significance in initiating a new poetic fashion in the Qing Dynasty of learning the Song poetry. In the reign of Emperor Kangxi (1661-1722), Wu Zhizhen's Collected Works of Eight Poets and Wang Shizhen's Anthology of Reminiscent Poems show their trend in learning the Tang and Song poetry writing, which demonstrates their awareness of enhancing the status of the Song poetry and stresses the importance of scholarship. In the mid of the Qing Dynasty, Anthology of the Qing Poems of Hangzhou Prefecture edited by Wu Hao and Wu Zhenyu displays another characteristic of the Song poetics, namely, the fusion of learning into poetical writing, and advances the notion of the scholar poets. Furthermore, Chen Yan's Anthology of Modern Poetry, proposing the concept of integrating scholars'statements with poets', is virtually a collection of all poetic views held by the school of the Song poetics throughout the Qing Period.Chapter VII, regarding as representatives Deng Hanyi's Appreciating Poetry, Sun Xiong's History of Poetry during the Reigns of Emperors Daoguang, Xianfeng, Tongzhi and Guangxu, and Zhang Yingchang's Singing the Qing Poems, investigates social practices of the times in which the three anthologies occurred and the poetics development that they reflect, hence demonstrating their views on poetry history. The following three appendixes, serving as a clear review of the profile of the collections, display the constituent elements and editions of the Qing poetry anthologies, and so are of value in documentation.On the whole, the above has given a rough account of the profile and features of anthologies of the Qing poems, indicating their relationship with poetics criticism and poetry creation. Lastly, the conclusion to the paper accounts briefly for the creations, the weaknesses of the study and future research into the Qing anthologies.