Zhongyan Law Conferred

Rhymed Fu regulated prose-poetry is an important form of Fu-style literature. Most of rhymed fu works were created in the three dynasties of Tang, Song and Qing. They occupy an important position in the literary world. Fan Zhongyan is a rhymed fu master of North Song Dynasty, leaving 35 rhymed fu works to us. Fan's rhymed fu works hold exquisite creating skills and extraordinary artistic levels, fully representing the overall outlook of rhymed fu works in North Song Dynasty.This article takes Fan's rhymed fu works as its study object, adopts the method combining case analysis and inductive synthesis and summarizes the features and literary thoughts by deeply interpreting the rhymed fu works, trying to provide some new viewpoints and discussions for people to fully understand Fan's literary achievements and his position in the literary history and trying to give some contributions to further studies to rhymed fu style literature and objective descriptions to Chinese ancient literature.The first chapter briefly discusses the origin, development and styles of rhymed fu.The second chapter analyzes Fan's rhymed fu conception through his one article discussing fu-style literature questions.The third chapter analyzes the characteristics of Fan's rhymed fu works from the three aspects of style, content and skill. In the analysis to the styles, the chapter analyzes the inheritance and breakthrough to the rhymed fu styles of Tang in the two aspects of rhyme sequence and sentence structure, on the basis of relating concepts to rhymed fu provided by Fu Spectrum of Tang Dynasty. In the analysis to the contents, the chapter gives overall classification to the conceptions of Fan's rhymed fu works and makes summarization to the three aspects of Jundao (the Way of Ruler), Chendao (the Way of a Minister) and Xingdao. On the basis of analyses to the characteristics of his rhymed fu works, the creating skills come to the end naturally.The fourth chapter analyzes Fan's literary theory of "Complementarity of Form and Content" and his some literary opinions and further exploits the intrinsic factors that help form the characteristics of his rhymed fu works.Fan devoted many efforts in creating rhymed fu works and even his narrative-style prose was also greatly influenced by his rhymed fu creation, forming the feature of "writing the prose in the format of fu." The fifth chapter just analyzes his such creation phenomenon, in order to reveal the important role of the rhymed fu creation played in Fan's huge literary achievements.