Suzhe's Theory Of Prose And His Creation Of Prose

Su Zhe, one of Tang and Song Eight Essayists, played an important role in the history of ancient essay development. Together with his father and brother, he was honored greatly among people now. However, because of the great achievement of his brother, Su Shi, his reputation was shadowed and his works were not paid enough attention to. The paper aims to study Su Zhe's essay theories and works, reveal objective facts of literature development and enable people to know more about Su Zhe's literature achievements and his contribution to literature history.The introduction of the paper is about Su Zhe's family and growth, literature achievement and its effect on after-age essayists and the present situation of the study on Su Zhe. The paper consists of four parts.The first chapter discusses the development of Su Zhe's essay theories. There were three sources for Su Zhe's essay theories: first, strong Bashu culture and academic schools had great effect on Su Zhe's theories and works; second, prosperous development of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism in Song dynasty were the source of Su Zhe's thought development; third, some literators of his time, such as Ou Yangxiu, Su Xun, Su Shi and so on influenced his life and literature writing. The second chapter introduces Su Zhe's essay theories. Su Zhe's essay theories are systematic. His thoughts of articles should have effect on social reality was consistent with the thought trend of the reform time and he advocated"articles should reveal social drawbacks and promote people correct the drawbacks", which represented the writing thoughts of argumentum school in Song dynasty. His thoughts on the relationship between form and contents of articles were limited within the traditional thoughts on the relationship and insisted that form should be consistent with content and content is more important than form. Besides, Su Zhe put forward the ideology of"articles should consist of literary spirit"and thought reading and social practice could cultivate writers'literary spirit, which was the remarkable characteristics of Su Zhe's"Literary Spirit Cultivating Theory"and played an important role in development of Chinese"Literary Spirit Theories."Chapter Three explored artistic characteristics of Su Zhe'prose. Su Zhe attached great importance to rhetoric, conception and structure arrangement of prose and was good at using metaphors, parallelism and other rhetoric skills. As a result, his prose were conceived subtly, structured flexuously and seemed simple but meticulous. Chapter Four discussed Su Zhe's role in the development of Chinese prose. Su Zhe gained monumental fame for his great achievements and his prose were paid close attention to before and after his death. However, compared with other Tang & Song essayists, Su Zhe's historical status rises and falls with the changes of times.