Qing Dynasty Writer Tu Gentry Life, Writings

Tu Shen, a novelist, was born in 1744 and died in 1801, living across the reigns of Qianlong and Jiaqing in the Qing Dynasty. A Jinshi (a successful candidate in the highest imperial examination for the selection of officials), he was once appointed as Tongpan(an assistant official to the local governor but responsible directly to the emperor) of Guanzhou. Although a fellow poet in the circle of Hong Liangji and Huang Jingren, Tu Shen is known for his unique style of writing novels: his language is classical and demanding as far as the understanding is concerned, his stories ridiculous and absurd. His fictional oeuvre includes The History of Yin, Suo-jin Za-ji, and Lu-he Nei-wai Suo-yan. Lu Xun once acclaimed The History of Yin in this way: 'If you want to seek for the beautiful and elegant language in novels, the justified target should be the twenty volumes of The History of Yin written by Tu Shen '. But unfortunately, the literary achievements of him remained obscure during his life. This thesis, however, attempts an internal and return-to-the-work-itself exploration of his works, and an explanation for his life and works from the perspective of the so-called big culture.The thesis falls into four sections. In the introduction part, the author makes a review of the previous researches on Tu Shen, trying to locate the issues ignored by those researchers and lay a methodological foundation for the present study through learning from and adopting their methods. Through an introduction based on biographical recordings and the very texts of his works to Tu Shen's family background, all his life, his circle of friends, and thoughts, the first chapter of the thesis has corrected several mistakes about his life and analyzed the cause for his eccentric thoughts and character from the perspective of the historical and cultural background. The second chapter studies the works of Tu Shen from the perspectives of philology and bibliology: the existence and missing of his works, different editions of the existent works, the differences between the various editions of the same work, the relationship between them, the time and place of the missing of them, and the causes for the missing. Based on the previous two chapters, the third part of the thesis summarizes the literary achievements made by Tu Shen, which includes both his novel writing and poem composing; employing the methods and adopting the views of school classification and identification, the summary is carried out by analyzing both the contents and forms of his key works.