The Study On Wang Yingchen’s Letters

Wang Yingchen is one famous scholar-official in the Southern Song. He was born in the late of the Northern Song and primarily lived in the early Southern Song. He made mant friends in his whole life, such as Zhao Ding, Lv Benzhong, Zhang jun, Zhu Xi, Lv Zuqian and Zhou Bida, and so on. The objective of my master’s thesis is to examine and interpret the achivement and thougts of Wang Yingchen, who was politicians, neo-confucianism and astronomersone and mainly lived in the first half of the South Song Dynasty, via chronicling all existing letters written by Wang, amounting to96overall, especially following the principle of knowing both the author and his time and the research orientation that placing the same emphasis on literature and thought.There is no one informative and reliable chronology of Wang Yingchen. Thus the first chapter writes his whole life, by looking into all kinds of books. Then this thesis analyzes Wang’s position in the South Song Dynasty and influence on later generations.Based on the chronicle of the appendix, the second chapter examines the politics, neo-confucianism and literary thoughts of Wang Yingchen’s letters and the other writings, and place his thougts into the intellectual history of the South Song Dynasty and even the whole ancient China, which leads to the characteristics of his thougts. This article considers that Wang Yingchen’s political thoughts include the people-rooted thought, talent thought and official management thought, neo-Confucianism thoughts include the behavior purpose of justice and honesty, the thougts on study of learning the predecessor to promote morality, thinking deeply and applying assiduously, and the literary thoughts include the relationship between the literary and the principle(the literary’s function is to narrate and to state the principle) and the writing method of poetry (maximizing the meaning and neglecting literaryism).The third chapter analyzes the artistic characteristics of Wang’s letters and comes to a conclusion that the style features are precise, meticulous, depressed and grief. Besides, the inguistic features are exact, succinct and vivid. In addition, the rhetorical devices include metaphor, parallelism, erotesis, citation and repetition. To sum up, based up chronicle and analyzing the ideological content and artistic characteristics of Wang Yingchen’s letters, this thesis narrates his life story priliminary, clarify his role in the South Song Dynasty and the impact on the later ages, and depict one political and academic circle based on him in that ages. This work has importang implications for the study on Wang Yingchen’s writings, thougts, and even the whole neo-confucianism and literature history of the South Song Dynasty.The appendix chronicles86of96letters,that were written by Wang to his friends from Shaoxing five years(1135AD) to Chunxi first year(1174AD), by analyzing two different versions of his sample reels and using some traditional research methods, including collating, compling, discrimination, verifying, etc. Its significance lies in:firstly discussing some details of his whole life; secondly investing the intercourse between him and his teachers, friends and disciple; thirdly laying the foundation for further study on the methods and artistic features of his letters.