A Study On The Biographies Written By Wang Daokun

Wang Daokun(1525-1593) was one of the important litterateurs in the late Ming Dynasty. He was konwn as one of The Five Later Leaders of the Literary Renaissance during Ming Dynasty, and enjoyed an extremely great reputation.Tai Han Ji, his masterpiece of poems and proses,involved biographies—one special kind of practical style in ancient China up to600000words, accounting for about1/3of the total number. The large amounts of the biographies written by him have the profound influence as the typical representative..This article takes all of the extant biographies written by Wang Daokun as research subjects, which aims to comprehensively investigate the values of the biographies written by Wang Daokun in various aspects and to analyze their stylistic characteristics and the position in the history of writing biographies.The paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a preface to briefly introduce the significance, the status and the method of the research and so on.The second chapter, A summary of the biographies written by Wang Daokun, introduces the general information of the biographies. The first section combs the historical definition of biographies and clarifies the concept using in this paper and introduces the collection situation in Tai Han Ji. The second section gives a list of statistics to record all the titles of his biographies, the person’s names of biographies, their native places, identity or occupation, attaching other biography index by reading all the biographies written by Wang Daokun. The third section introduces the reasons that Wang Daokun wrote so many biographies briefly.The third chapter, An analysis of representative various characters in the biographies written by Wang Daokun, investigates the emphasis on creating different characters by combining the text.This analysis is based on the sample of four types of representative people, including officials, businessmen, ordinary scholars and women.The fourth chapter, The value, feature and influence of the biographies written by Wang Daokun, discusses a series of problems on historical value, literature value, writing characteristics and the impact on future generations.