On LiZhi's Novel Aesthetic Thought

The novel criticisim of Li Zhi in the late Ming Dynasty isn't systematic and order. Strictly speaking, Li Zhi isn't a genuine novel critic and theorist. But he created a new situation to the novel theory with the significant contribution. Li Zhi firstly standardized the novel's form, probed into the novel the artistic characteristic and aesthetic connotation by using the pattern of marginal remark, thus greatly improved the novel's social status and literary value.Li Zhi's novel aesthetic thought is very abundant. His ideas guiding novel creation, interesting, genuine, wonderful and strange—his aesthetic standard, nature—his aesthetic idealism, are all rich in aesthetic connotation and theoretical value. The deepest excavation to Li's novel aesthetic thought will not only perfect this researth of the ancient aesthetics thoughts, but enrich the trail of researth on the thought of the contemporary aesthetics.From the view of aesthetics, according to Rong Yu Tang edition of Shui Hu Zhuan, This thesis carefully combes Li's novel aesthetic thought and made intensive analysis.It consists of four charpters.Charter One illustrates the historical and cultural background that Produces Li's novel aesthetic thoughts: The "common" custom build a more loose social and cultural environment for Li's novel aesthetic thoughts in the late Ming Dynasty; The trend of man's individual character intiative promote Li's novel aesthetic thought in the late Ming Dynasty; Chinese cultural and academic background enrich Li's novel aesthetic thoughts. The main body of the thesis is from Charter two to charpter four, which illustrate the main contents of Li's novel aesthetic thoughts. Charter Two illustrates novel's ontology of Li Zhi, which mainly discussed the stylistic view of Li Zhi's novel and Li Zhi's contemplation on the nature of novel. That is, the nature of novel is that novel is the reflection of actual life and the representation of one's real feeling and mood. Charter Three illustrates his thoughts of novel creativity, which discussed that the anger is drive of his novel creation and "innocent mind" is the source of the best literary works. Charter Four mainly discusses the aesthetic pursuit of novel. It consists of two sections. The first section mainly deals with the standard of aesthetics: interesting, genuine, wonderful and strange—track down the origin of every category and probe into the aesthetic connotation and sense. The second section deals with the idealism of aesthetics: nature—mainly analyses the specific implication of Li Zhi's "nature".The conclusion points out that Li Zhi's novel aesthetics plays an important part in Chinese classical novel aesthetics. It not only enlightens the aesthetics of sublime inmodern era, has a great influence upon both novel theories and novel writings, but hold a sense of enlightenment to literary creation and construction on literature theory.