The Influence Of The Book Of Documents On The Literary Mind And The Carving Of Dragons

Liu Xie's literary thought was rooted in the Confucian thoughts represented by the Five Classics. As the Book of Documents itself had the stylistic characteristics of representativeness and diversity, while evaluating previous literary works, Liu Xie selected some of them as a model, such as Yaodian《(尧典》), Tang Letters Patent《(汤诰》), Great Yu Mo《(大禹谟》), and so on. And when he started his exposition, he, on the one hand, quoted a large number of materials from the Book of Documents and, on the other hand, directly cited some viewpoints as the grounds of his argument.The influences the Book of Documents has on the Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, as will be discussed in the thesis, include three aspects. First, the Book of Documents'classification of literary works led to the thinking of the principles of stylistic classification. Second, the thought of Five Elements in the Book of Documents ? Hongfan(《尚书·洪范》) affected literature and also influenced Liu Xie's View on the Stylistic Qualities. Third, the view of diction value embodying the essentials in the Book of Documents developed into the theoretical basis which Liu Xie used to defend the orthodox Confucian literary concepts and to start literature study and, based on which, the practice of literary criticism took the specific writings from the Book of Documents as examples, complementing each other and constituting the complete system of Liu Xie's study of writing.