The Activities Of Collating Books And The Literature Form In The Western Han Dynasty

The Western Han Dynasty was the key period of literature classicization after the event of burning books and burying Confucian scholars alive in the Qin Dynasty for which most of the classic literatures needed to be rewritten.Scholars in the Han Dynasty revised and compiled the ancient literaturewhonot only cared about the form of words and text but also made efforts to reinterpret classical meaning,so as to meet the needs of the times.This paper selects activities of collating books in Western Han as the starting point,mainly focuses on the institution of the Western Han Dynasty’s literature work,and probes into the forming path and significant features of Western Han Dynasty academic system and literary form in the state construction and ideological integration background.The first chapter is about historical facts of documents collating work in the Western Han Dynasty,discussing the condition of selecting and collecting books and the corresponding location,officialsetc..Since HanXing,the literature collection work had been flourishing,while the mature management system of literature selection and collection of Han Dynasty formed on the basis of inheritingthe experience of the literature work in the Pre-Qin period.Especially in locations and officials in charge etc.,literature collection in Western Han had a tendency of inner and outer distinction.What’s more,the position of ‘neishu’ gradually rose,of which the management also varied with the change of the Han system,and more specifically it largely dependent on the changes of Han Dynasty’s political power.Literature work became a key point for the construction of the official ideology of Han Dynasty.Based on the discussion of historical facts,the second part of this dissertationcomments on these problems such as “What kinds of books are collected in the Western Han Dynasty? How are books classified? All kinds of literature status are important?” and discusses the different documents in different stages of the Western Han Dynasty,of which the deep reason lies in the transfer of academic atmosphere.The internal and external pattern of the book collection can also be used to analyze the basic situation of the official learning in the Han Dynasty,and thus leads to the classification of the literature.The classic books and records of "Six Arts" were regarded as the result of ancient wisdom and became the discourse resources when variable thoughts were conflicting,and their classic position was firmly established in the Han Dynasty.With the variation of Han Dynasty’s main academic form,the definition of ‘neixue’ also changed several times.The literature pedigree of Western Han was finally constructed by Liu Xiang and Liu Xin,which reconstructed the knowledge system of the pre Qin Dynasty and established the status of various types of literature,still,its ultimate purpose was the pursuit of the establishment of the Han Dynasty’s ‘the inner ruling the outer’ ‘the inner coordinating with the outer’ that was‘xinwang guan xue’.The third chapter discusses in the Zhou Dynasty,under the circumstance of the chaos of cultural norms,with the continuous improvement of the system construction of Qin and Han dynasties,how to stabilize the writing system of Chinese characters,how to classify the classic texts and to what extent these two issues are related.Unified language and character are the inevitable requirements for the construction of unification culture.“Yi Wen Zi” may be regarded as a political issue in the short Qin Dynasty,but it has become a cultural issue that must be fundamentally solved in the Han Dynasty.With the continuous improvement of the standardization of official script,it eventually becomes the common passage of the Han Dynasty with the seal script.It is in the literature work that it gradually builds a stable system of Chinese writing characters,while the system also provides a guarantee for the styling of classic texts.Of course,teaching classical works is still in the terms of both oral and textual narration that co-exist in this period.Factors such as “Shi Fa”,“Jia Fa”,ancient and modern characters all have some effect on the formation of classical texts in the Han Dynasty.The fourth chapter presents the influence of the literature work in Han on the development of the Han Dynasty literature,in which the collection of the six arts classics accounted for the main part.This chapter pays attention to how literary creation developed from the perspectives of the literary style,literary production form,classic-worship concept etc.,and how the strong sense of classic-worship in Western Han’s literature ultimately formed during the transformation process in the form of dissemination of knowledge from the oral narration to the textual narration.Classic texts were the most crucial in the Han Dynasty literature system,which were regarded as the standard of orthography implemented by the authority to conduct cultural construction and the typical models of writing.Therefore,it can reasonably infer that the classics were thought highly and imitated frequently in literary creation in Han,and they also became the main origins of literary style.Moreover,the experience of the text proposition,author’s naming,the writing and creative ability gained in the literature collation activities of Han Dynasty also gave a great impetus to the development of literature in the Han Dynasty.This dissertation emphatically investigates the inner and outer distinction of literature collating work in Western Han,which also analyzes its internal factor of system and power structure and makes further research from the perspectives of the classification of Western Han’s literature,the integration of knowledge concept and the construction of academic system etc.,to point out that the purport of the system of ‘xin wang guan xue’ is ‘the inner ruling the outer’ and ‘the inner coordinating with the outer’.Meanwhile,the ‘classic worship’ concept is studied in the cultural background of the transformation of knowledge dissemination from oral narration to textual narration with a close relationship to Western Han’s literature collating work.