Research On Zhu Xi's Prefaces & Postscripts

Zhu Xi is a comprehensive successor of Neo-Confucianism and a remarkable litterateur as well. In his life, he created plenty of poems and prose. He was well versed in literature both practically and theoretically. His prose gained outstanding achievement in the Southern Song Dynasty in fact. However, affected by his identity of Ngp-Confucianism master, research in his prose is always insufficient.The preface and postscript, as a style of prose, is well accepted by writers because of its flexibility and variety. During Song Dynasty, prefaces and postscripts were composed on a large scale and full-developed also. From then on, preface and postscript has become a new, independent type of prose used in both academic research and literary creation.Zhu Xi was also a marvelous proficient in writing preface & postscript in the Southern Song Dynasty. Over 400, preface & postscript, as a part of his prose, contained various accomplishment in different fields, including literature, philosophy, history, politics etc. No matter on the accomplishments of Zhu Xi, which reflected by them, or their own literary value, there is great research worthiness.According to the text of Zhu Xi's preface &postscript itself, this thesis studies the written time of them, from the 25^th year of ShaoXing (A.D. 1155) to the 6^th year of QingYuan (A.D. 1200), covering 45 years in Zhu Xi's life. On the other hand, the thesis analyses the inherent connotation and the external representation in space-time relationship.Compared with other research fields, great efforts could be made in researching Zhu Xi's prose. Through the preface & postscript creation, this is the first attempt to seek after the real status and potential value of Zhu Xi's prose neglected historically. That is the intention and the meaning of this thesis as well.