A Study On Zeng Guo-fan's Style Opinions

Zeng Guo-fan is one of the important figures at the key time of societal changes in modern China. He also is one of the illustrious but controversial men in modern, contemporary, even present China. In the more than one hundred years after his death, the research and judgment about him has been absolutely continuing, and there even were two hot tides. In the former one hundred years, the research was mainly about his historic contribution and mistakes. From 1980s, the research has been expanding to his opinions on Westernization, family education, talented persons, regimen, cultivating moral character, Neo-Confucianism and statecraft, academic ideology and so on. Zeng Guo-fan's writing act and theory have always been appraised highly but generally. The deep study is little and scattered, in want of systematic character, and there are a lot of virgin lands to clear up. For all of these reasons, I focus on one of the virgin lands in the research of Zeng Guo-fan's ideas about articles and arts in this paper: Zeng Guo-fan's opinions on styles. I have tried hard to gather the materials entirely and then explore Zeng Guo-fan's style opinions comprehensively and deeply.As the base of the research of Zeng Guo-fan's style opinions, this paper firstly describes the meanings of writing and article, the history and the theory of styles in ancient China. After that, the text begins. It is divided into three chapters.In the first chapter, I mainly interpret Zeng Guo-fan's overall style opinions. Zeng commended all the styles' experts. And he asked his brothers, sons, and nephews to practice all kinds of styles, such as ancient prose, fashionable prose,...