On Zhonzuoren's Outlook Of Taste

So far the research works on Zhou Zuoren remain voluminous, but few people would pay attention to the research of Zhou's equally voluminous essays as an independent whole. This paper is but an effort to approach to Zhou by interpreting his essays, and in doing so it just focuses its attention upon the key word "taste", which has been a clue that unites Zhou's thousands of essays, and the relative concepts that may help make the research effort a profound and extensive one.This paper is divided into four parts. The first part tries to find out roughly the content and range of Zhou's taste by sticking to the meaning of some principal concepts such as "fun" and "interest". Based on the key concept "taste" and its analysis, the second part endeavors to appreciate the style and aesthetic significance of Zhou's essays, while the third part just gropes to ascertain his views on "taste" from the angles of "sense" and "sensibility". And finally the fourth part discusses the cultural background that helps shape his views on "taste" and his spiritual trend of "individualism" that makes him stick to them. By means of the discussion included in the four parts of the paper, I hope to obtain a panoramic picture of Zhou's essay writing, which is a single unity but with a face of great diversity, and to find out the profound meaning involved in his much personalized way of essay writing.