On Ouyang Zhan And His Prose

Ouyang Zhan was the first Fujian’s litterateur that nationally known. As he was very closed:o Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan and his achievements in creating ancient Chinese prose actively, Duyang Zhan became a active participant in early stage’s ancient literature movement. Therefore, scholars of later age pay much attention on him. However, Ouyang Zhan never got the enough attention which he deserved from academia because he died at an young age and left very few works. In fact, as a representative of Fujian’s culture and education rising period, Ouyang Zhan’s life experience and the depth and artistic attainments of his works are worth of study. By studying Ouyang Zhan and his prose creation, we could know the change of scholars’mind in Fujian after the An Lushan Rebellion. Moreover, we could know status of Fujian area’s culture and education development in Middle Tang Dynasty partially.This paper divided into five parts:First part introduced Ouyang Zhan’s family history and his lifetime based on the combination of the former study and the new materials.Second part is the research of Ouyang Zhan’s friends. By adopting the method of mutual reflection of literature and history, this paper divides his friends into four categories-aristocrats, ancient prose masters, low-level officials and people who detached from the secular moral codes in order to deepen the understanding of him. Third part analyzed Ouyang Zhan’s literature viewpoint. The author sorted out Ouyang Zhan’s general principles in his works by reading them in depth and analyzed from morality, affection, artistry and innovation. Fourth part is the study of the main idea of Ouyang Zhan’s prose. Focusing on his remained prose as well as the prose classification idea from relevant scholars, this paper explained separately about the rational prose, narrative prose and affective prose to reveal Ouyang Zhan’s attachment to affection and his stick to ambition.Last part is the appreciation of artistic features of Ouyang Zhan’s prose According to former related evaluation, the author made a tentative analysis of the artistic features by his own understandings and concluded into two functions-reasoning and describing love.