Ye Shengtao: Between Literature And Education

Ye Shengtao is an important writer in modern Chinese literary history. His keen interest and passion in education and literature enables him to choose the subject of education as his unique content expression. He built a fairly large-scale "education world", which has become the most striking and unique literary phenomenon in the modern literary history. He used varieties of literature and art forms such as stories, essays, fairy tales and poetries to build bridges connecting modern Chinese literature and modern Chinese education.Ye Shengtao, who had dual identity of both writer and educator, has made outstanding achievements in the field of modern Chinese literature and education. The current academic research on the works of Ye Shengtao has yielded fruitful results. However, there is still a lack of research on the relationship between his educator identity and literature creation as well as explorations on the integration of the form of literature and educational ideological content. Therefore, the study on Ye Shengtao, whose works lie between education and literature, provides a new research perspective for pure literary studies, and is more close to the original literature. This paper mainly uses literature, philology and history research methods with following major contents:The first chapter illustrates Ye Shengtao's literati temperament and educational personality. It mainly reveals the relationship between the shaping and the mutual penetration of Ye Shengtao's literati temperament and educational personality, which is one of the essential conditions that enables Ye Shengtao to become a pioneer in China's new literary history and also an important outstanding educator in Chinese education history; thereby providing background information for topic-based solution.The second chapter studies literary enlightenment and education for national salvation. This paper tries to provide a theoretical basis for the result through the source of Ye Shengtao's literary creation, namely, the ideological level, to explore the harmony and unity of the double identity as a writer and educator.The Third and fourth chapters clarify writers'education and educator's literature. As a writer, Ye Shengtao created plenty of education-themed fictions, fairy tales, prose and other literary forms, through which the author presented his view of education. As an educator, Ye Shengtao strived to achieve the pursuit of aesthetics in the creation of Chinese standardization system and then pointed to the ideal of education, thereby providing better services for their own education targets and highlighting the educational function of literature.Based on text analysis, this chapter shows that the educational stories in Ye Shengtao's short stories reveal a characteristic of "'wisdom' hidden in the 'ash'", uncovered the filling wisdom under the gray style. The novel "Ni Huanzhi" was Ye Shengtao's practice of John Dewey's education thinking; meanwhile, it reflected his ideal education and made great contributions to modern Chinese education fiction. The adult-oriented fairy tales were an expression of the "sorrow of adults" through dreamy stories favored by children. Creative points of view such as the both soft and strong characteristics in a refined prose, not only conclude features of the author's general prose, but also summarize the overall styles of educational prose as well as the educational, lyrical, and normative characteristics in his educational prose.The fifth chapter demonstrates the impact of Ye Shengtao's educational status on his literary creation according to the contribution and the limitations of Ye Shengtao's literature creation in his educator capacity from both positive and negative aspects. As an educator, Ye Shengtao made a unique contribution to the literature creation, but his difficulty to go beyond the circumstances of education also limits his field of literature with "more ambitious development", and makes some of his works "narrow" in vision, "shallow" in meaning and "adultification" in fairy tales.In short, the papers does a comprehensive survey in four levels, ranging from the Ye Shengtao's personal growth experiences, developments and changes of thoughts, the practice of literary creation (mainly in textual analysis perspective), and the impact of educational status on literary creation to explore Ye Shengtao's writing perspective as a creative writer and his educational practice as an educator to combine educational thinking with the realm of writing, understanding progress of the interaction, upgrading and deepening between the two aspects, thereby recognizing the valuable cultural heritage that Ye Shengtao has left to us, and rediscovering the meaning in literary.