Zuoren Aesthetics Of Daily Life In Prose

Zhou Zuoren is a prominent forerunner of modern Chinese prose writings, and one of the renowned authors in the history of the new-vernacular literature. Disregarding the controversial perspective of "negating one's articles in virtue of his personality", Zhou is very conducive to the development of the new-vernacular literature concerning both his advocacy of employing modern writing concepts and his artistic practice of composing modern essays. This thesis tries to interpret Zhou's essays in the light of daily life, probing into his aesthetic notions of leisurely grace, bitter solitude and mundane flavor by focusing on the aesthetic objects of daily life presented in his works, such as dainty food, tea and wine, plus flowers, birds, fishes and insects, etc. Zhou maintained the temperament and taste that is typical of the traditional Chinese scholar-bureaucrats, and the aesthetic thoughts concealed in his essays can be deemed as an extension of the traditional Chinese aesthetic realm, and simultaneously as an artistic lifestyle in a given society. Via integrating the subtle feelings of living souls into the trivial experience of daily life, and constructing them in an aesthetic lifestyle, Zhou's aesthetic pursuit came into being. The author of this thesis tends to carry out an explication from the following dimensions:In Chapter 1, based on the brief descriptions of concepts of the daily life, we can know there exist important aesthetic values in the life. Meanwhile, living aesthetics in the essays by Zhou Zuoren will be briefly introduced.In Chapter 2, the practice contents of the aesthetics will be shown in the light of food, customs, livings and rainy seasons based on life practices.In Chapter 3 the body of the thesis, main features of the living aesthetics are analyzed in detail. From the perspective of qualitative, quantitative and purposive, three features can be described as fellws:the tendency to take the bitterness as beauty, the style to take lightness as beauty and the subject to take interest as beauty.In Chapter 4, the cause of living aesthetics will be analyzed from four aspects: Chinese traditional Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, Modern Europaen Thought, Japanese culture and times factors.In Chapter 5, objective observation and criticizing on the aesthetics are made. And through the comparison between the artified life concepts and specific aesthetics ideal and the status of the people in modern times, the enlightenments and instructions to the modern life will be revealed.