Study On Yuan Brothers' Prose Of Gongan School

Yuan brothers(Yuan Hongdao,Yuan Zongdao and Yuan Zhongdao),the representatives of Gongan School during the Ming Dynasty,composed various and abundant prose which showed distinctive artistic style and profound cultural connotation with their generality and peculiarity coexisting.Combined with Three Yuan's life experience and thoughts,this study is conducted from the perspectives of stylistics,aesthetics and culturology in order to investigate the relationships between Three Yuan's prose and their literature theory and define the status of Gongan School in the history of Chinese prose.This study can be divided into two parts.The first three chapters mainly discussed the era and culture background when Gongan School came into being and developed.Besides,the change of Three Brothers' life experiences and thoughts and their contributions to Gongan School were also analyzed in this part.The first chapter probed into the era background and reasons of Gongan School's vigorous growth during the late Ming Dynasty.The investigation of the propositions and creative practice should echoed with its origin,prosperity and recession of the whole process.And the most objective perspective should lay in the comprehensive analysis of historical,social and cultural background of that time.This study thus cannot detach from the precarious and turmoil background of Ming Dynasty.In the second chapter,the cloistered life,friendship and inner journey of Three Yuanwere explored and studied.Region and family were the original cultural nourishment of Three Yuan,which played a significant role in their thoughts and growth.They made it to the elites through imperial examinations,eventually known for Gongan School.Chu culture,represented by Sao and Zhuang,influenced Three Yuan's personality and spirit and further affected their literature propositions and creative practice.Three Yuan brothers sought for different approaches to the contradiction of career and reclusive life due to their dissimilar dispositions and experiences.Yuan Zongdao mentally hid with an expectation of achieving spiritual self-transcendence by virtue of Buddism;Yuan Hongdao followed as a behavioral hermit and he freely switched between a officer and a hermit;while Yuan Zhongdao deserved being a “official reclusion”as a result of a unsuccessful career in the his youth and no expectation for official enterprise during his declining years.Social activities and journey education not only influenced the development of Three Yuan's academic thoughts and life alternatives,but also acted as a pushing power for Gongan School's prosperity.The third chapter discussed an exploration for the interaction and modification of Three Yuan's ideas about literature.The idea of Three Yuan brothers of Gongan School serves as a whole and gradually comes to be evolved in the backwash of the retro trend,going through a process of a gradual,continuous correction.Overall,the concept of change is the logical starting point of the Three Brothers' literary theory with Xinwan and Xinkou,which means one speaks spontaneously,as its expressive path.Moreover,possessing an interest of appreciating poems is the aesthetic orientation of the three Yuan brothers' literary theory.During the whole process of Gongan School's development,Three Yuan made different contributions to the theoretical construction.Their literary theories affect each other,manifestingthe firmness among the school members.The second part has four paragraphs,mainly discussing Three Yuan's prose composition.This study will begin with traveling itineraries and then biography,epistolary art and narration in order to analyze conveniently.Although this study cannot incorporate the whole works of Three Yuan,the general style and features can be portrayed.The fourth chapter discussed Three Yuan's creation of traveling itineraries.The writing of their traveling itineraries always obeys the principle that express intelligence without stereotype,which,to some extent,got rid of the aesthetic paradigm of previous style and broke the structure of expressing feelings and ambition,and reflect a special ways of writing.Not only did their writings show great consistency of aesthetic taste and artistic expression but also exhibited different characteristics because of the variety of their life experiences,spiritual character as well as academic ideas.Biography creation of Yuan brothers will be discussed in chapter five.Their numerous correspondences not only reflected their personal lives but also formed a overlapping and diverse friends circle,created by Yuan Zongdao,developed by Yuan Hongdao and consolidated by Yuan Zhongdao after the other two died.In addition,their correspondences also have literary value and aesthetic value.The creation of preface articles(a type of ancient Chinese literature)of Yuan brothers will be presented in chapter six.Yuan brothers' preface articles mainly consist of three types:book preface,farewell preface and birthday preface.Their book prefaces can intensively reflect their literary concepts and aesthetic taste and some book prefaces are essays with meaningful language and parallels in between.Creating farewell and birthday prefaces,they didn't stick to one form.Instead,some fine pieces of writing had focused on describing figures and narration,combining lyric with reasoning to break tradition.In chapter seven,the Orderly Literary was demonstrated which includes three categories:preface,present the preface and birthday essays.Preface centrally reflects the literary ideas and aesthetic taste of Yuan brothers,some of which themselves are excellent essays with meaningful,charming and rhythmic languages;besides,the present the preface and birthday essays,breaking the convention of Orderly Literary creation,rate narration along with the amalgamation of lyricing and reasoning very highly.The scope that Yuan brothers' Orderly Literary expression covers is extensive,involving various aspects like literature,art,literary elegance,recorded traveling and religion.A wide range of mode of expression such as narration,description,argument and lyricism is employed alternately to create the orderly literary as well as enhance the artistic appeal in company with the integration of various techniques like metaphor,comparison,parallel and rhetorical questions.