A Study On The Literary Sketches Of The Tang Dynasty

The fiction of Tang Dynasty has three forms--Literary Sketches,ZhiGuai,and Romance. Till now, the study on literary sketches has not been beyond merely publishing literature works or material's reference. This situation is derived from hereinafter two reasons; firstly, the nomenclative confusion between literary sketches and fiction has been existed after Tang Dynasty, Scholars failed to specify the differences between these two concepts; secondly, sticking to the fictive story, Scholars usually skip over it rashly. No enough attention has been paid to this field of study by our literary world; no comprehensive study seems to have been made of them. So,the writer has made a rather bold attempt in doing some research on this subject and the gist of what has been found are summarized in this paper in terms of institution, process, evolution and content.Focus on Institution, the part one tend to specify the difference among Literary Sketches, ZhiGuai and Romance. As the preliminary research based on past study , this part is carried out by time sequence.Part two, namely the Process, try to discuss that all the Literary Sketches, ZhiGuai and Romance follow the process of "spread—record". Literary Sketches were generally the original resource of ZhiGuai and Romance. What's more, Literary Sketches do lots of benefit to understanding the spread style of Tang dynasty.Part three, the Evolution, try to prove that Literary Sketches was a new type of literary in Tang dynasty. Even was called fiction then, this kind of literary was different from the fiction tradition of Wei and Jin dynasty. Otherwise, it was called sketches by later people, but it is still different from the sketches tradition of Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasty.Part four, the Content, discuss the characteristic of Literary Sketches on fantastic recording. This part try to describe and explain the Literary Sketches by statistic, analysis and citing examples.All the effort taken on this research is for the part which probably has been neglected in the past long time. As an important part, the Literary Sketches played a role as the connection which complete the fiction history of Tang dynasty.