The Other Side Of Glory

The Historical Records (Shiji) was the first general biographical history book in China. Meanwhile, it was also a monumental monograph of biographical literature which has been canonized as the exemplar of prose writing for more than two thousand years. Innumerable experts have devoted themselves to the research on the Historical Records, while novice researchers are joining the ranks in the study. This thesis investigates into the quintessence of The Art of Character Portrait in the Historical Records from a brand new perspective of "the disadvantaged characters". By means of analyzing the disadvantaged characters in the Historical Records, the thesis tries to generalize Sima Qian's conceptualization of disadvantaged characters. Moreover, the thesis offers an original interpretation of the actual situation in the Disaster (upon Sima Qian) Incurred by Li Ling's Surrender. Since the thesis limits its discussion to the subject area of "war description", the author also presents referential viewpoints for the research on the war descriptions in the Historical Records.The thesis bases its discussion on the edition of the Historical Records published by the Zhonghua Book Bureau, and the author has consulted other history books and reference books for making investigations. By scrutinizing the text of the Historical Records, the thesis tries hard to gather relevant examples and evidences of disadvantaged characters in a comprehensive way. On the basis of the accumulated examples, the thesis inspects, one by one, the features of each disadvantaged character, as well as their relevant literary features which illustrate Sima Qian's conceptualization of disadvantaged characters.Chapter One is the introduction, and focuses on the definition of "disadvantaged character". On the basis of the definition, the chapter puts forward its own criterion of judging the status of disadvantaged characters. The chapter also presents the reasons for choosing war descriptions as the scope of research for the thesis, so as to designate the specific research objectives of the thesis.Chapter Two elaborates, in great detail, on the analysis of all sorts of disadvantaged characters, and empbys the victory or defeat of war as the criterion to initially categorize all the disadvantaged characters. The chapter is devoted to the thorough examination of the plight, mentality and shared features of the disadvantaged characters. As for those disadvantaged characters that have not been quoted in this chapter, the thesis puts the materials on them in the appendix attached at the end of the paper.Chapter Three focuses on the discussion of the artistic features of the portrait of disadvantaged characters. After the discussion on the two broad types of artistic techniques of description, the third section in this chapter makes an individual elucidation upon the analysis of one particular case.Chapter Four is the summary and application of the thesis. The first section in this chapter takes the discussion in the previous chapters as the basis for concluding about Sima Qian's conceptualization of disadvantaged characters. The second section applies this conceptualization to reinterpret Sima Qian's motivation for defending and pleading for Li Ling.