On The Literary Criticism Of Wu Shidao

WuShi-dao, a master of Neo-Confucianism, also excelled in literature, was profound in his knowledge and insightful in his views. He had a special status in the literary history of the late Yuan Dynasty for his literary achievement as well as his insightful literary theory displayed by his poetry talks and poetry. Research on him enables our understanding of on what attitudes and in what ways Neo-Confucianism was inherited and developed by people of Yuan Dynasty during the transition and changes from Song to Ming Dynasty on one hand, and on the other hand, through the case study of WuShi-dao, the literary critic, we can grasp more accurately and profoundly the status quo of literary creation and the value trends of literary criticism at the time of Yuan Dynasty.The thesis constitutes three parts:The first part made a brief introduction on the spread of Wu's works and summarized the criticism and studies that later generation made on him, it made clear the necessity and importance of further studies on Wu's theory of poetry criticism.The second part is the main part of the thesis, it is composed of six chapters. The first chapter introduced the cultural background on the putting forward of Wu's theory, it was expounded from two aspects: the status quo of poetry criticism in the late stage of Yuan Dynasty and the influence of Neo-Confucianism on Wu's view on poetry, which dominated the academic world at that time. The second chapter is the philosophical foundation for Wu's theory. It probed into Wu's literary ontology that"Poetry is out of one's qi"and previous studies on"qi". The third chapter started itself from the viewpoint of"cultivating qi", in which Wu's theory of poets'self-cultivation was introduced, the content of this theory and the ways of cultivating qi were analyzed. In the fourth chapter, the thesis elaborated on Wu's theory of literary creation, mainly focused on inspiration and the view of natural literary creation, that is, poetry is the display of one's own personality, which was emphasized by Wu. Combining Wu's theory that literary creation should abide the law, the thesis advocated that literary creation should be an integration of the"right principle"and"true emotion", where both were balanced. Chapter five had a discussion on Wu's criticism theory that poetry should be degage and philosophic: as a human, he valued moral quality and integrity, but did not give up poetry; as a poetic, his writing style was dominated by righteous, but not confined to it. The last chapter touched upon Wu's theory of poetry appreciation, considering the social malady that a farfetched interpretation was often given in order to look for novelty, the present thesis pointed out the timeliness of Wu's theory that"reader should not misunderstand the writer only by limited understanding of words'meaning", which demands the reader and writer's mutual anticipation in heart and examples were given in the detailed argumentation.The last part is the conclusion. Based on the overall background of the integration of Neo-Confucianism and literary, the co-appearing of learning something from the heart and learning something from the history, and the conflict of whether detaching from Tang Dynasty or from Song Dynasty, the present study made a sincere comment and argumentation on Wu's fair, objective, degage and broad reflection on these problems, and specified the significance and far- reaching influence of Wu's theory of poetry criticism on later generations.