The Study On The Landscape Articles In Northern Sung China

This dissertation is aimed to elaborate on the landscape articles of the North Song as a whole.The first part begins to explore the landscape essays of the North Song Dynasty and a comprehensive study and classification is conducted. In this part, landscape essays are mainly divided into five different types:mountain essays mainly concerned with the mountainous scenery, water essays about only waters, essays on both mountains and waters, essays on pavilions, pagodas, temples, houses and Xuan (a small room or veranda with windows), and essays on gardens andbridges. The former three types of essays are mostly concerned on nature landscape, while the latter two are closely connected to human culture. There is another type of writing, related to the mountain but not closely related, such as the wind of the mountain cave, and the sweet of Longjing, and so on.In each of the former three types of pure natural landscape writings, a further classification is made. As a result, the pure scenery articles and lyric or ambition expressing essays by means of the landscape are classified. The latter two kinds of writings are all the lyric or ambition expressing essays by means of the landscape. In this chapter, the tabulation is adopted, which displays the information of various essays, including information of the authors, the essay titles, and the location of the landscape mentioned in the essays. Furthermore, a summary of the characteristics of the essays are made. The statistics and the analyses of the landscape essays make a foundation for the further exploration in the following chapters, especially the study of the landscape essays in the North Song Dynasty in Chapter Four.Chapter Two analyzes two special kinds of " landscape essay ". These two kinds of essays are:short inscriptions and suspected landscape essay. The short inscriptions are identified as the landscape writing because such articles make a lot of wonderful description of the landscape, but on the same time, as a too short inscription, it is hard to be identified as an article. So it is classified into a special type. Some writings are analyzed in this part. As for the suspected landscape essays concerned, they have the titles often concerning mountains and waters, such Mountain Fu and Water Fu, but the content of the articles has nothing to do with landscape. Such writings cover the articles on geography, philosophy and political argumentation. Such articles are listed and their characteristics are further explained through specific examples.Based on the former exploration, Chapter Three gives a comprehensive analysis of the North Song landscape essays from two levels:the surface analysis and the deep study. On the first level, based on the list and illustration in Chapter Two, the surface analysis tends to give a direct visual impression of the North Song landscape essays as a whole. We can perceive at least6points from the illustration in Chapter Two. First, we can see the huge number of the North Song landscape essays. Second, there are more articles about the southern landscape than on the northern scenery. Third, most of the existing landscape articles in the North Song are written in the Mid-North Song Dynasty. Fourth, many articles are lyric essays and essays expressing ambitions by means of landscape. Fifth, the genres are diversified and various literary genres are displayed in landscapes writings. At last, long-length articles on landscape appeared. To illustrate these features, examples are precisely displayed, covering the titles of the articles, the authors, the meaning and significance of the articles, etc. On the second level, the second part of this chapter conducts a deep analysis of the landscape essays of the North Song Dynasty. This chapter explores from five angles the social environment and time features reflected and conveyed by the landscape articles in an invisible way:First, more landscape articles are concerned with the south. Second, most landscape articles appeared in the mid North Song. Third, a study on the skip from landscape poetry to landscape writings. Fourth, the research on the question of expressing one’s emotion and ambitions. At last, cultural features of the North Song landscape essays are analyzed.Focusing on the time spirit and expecting to know by a handful the wholes sack, Chapter Four is the illustration and specific analysis of the deep features explored in Chapter Four. Two articles of Fu with the same title are illustrated here, and the social reasons of the atmosphere that people wrote articles with same title are analyzed. The time features and how the literature displayed the time spirit are analyzed.In Chapter Five, some famous places in the landscape writings are presented and all the articles mentioning these scenic spots and related articles are searched. Through statistics, comparison and analysis, the cultural significance of these articles are displayed.The Conclusion part sums up the former argumentation, hopefully which may offer any help for future scholars of this field.