A Comparative Study Of Du Mu And Li Shangyin’s Pianwen

With the co-called “Junior-Li and Du”, Du Mu and Li Shangyin are importantwriters in late Tang. As great giants in literature, Du Mu and Li Shangyin have createdlarge amounts of Pianwen. There are both obvious similarities and significant differencesin their Pianwen`s ideological content and artistic. Conducting comparative study of theirPianwen can help us to grasp the characteristics of Pianwen created in late Tang Dynasty.This article contains three chapters. The first chapter focuses on the temporalbackground and literary creation tendency at that time. In late Tang Dynasty, a significantphenomenon has caused the researchers`attention that the whole society style haschanged into a cultural one，including writing articles，collecting books, the superiorattention changing from governmental issues to civilization, and the transform ofgenerals. The authors during this time had the same taste to pursue gorgeous style whencreating various kinds of articles. Furthermore, they paid more attention to parallel prosethan folk prose.The second chapter is divided into sections, focusing on Du Mu and Li Shangyin’ssimilarities and differences in Pianwen creation, through exploring the contents and artforms of their works. The similarity of contents is that their works both reflected thesocial life of that time. Moreover, there are two similarities in art forms which are themethod of parallel-folk joint and parallel style re-backing. The maindifference in theirthought refers to the political opinion and literary ideas. The differences of art devicescan be divided into five aspects: difference of allusions density and obvious level, ofexquisite antithesis standard, of folk prose similarity level, of expressing devices and ofthe whole article styles. In general, both of them have obtained outstanding achievementsin Pianwen creation, but Du Mu’s verses are similar to folk prose and he did not stick tothe model of Pianwen. He gave priority to expressing his own opinions. On the contrary,Li Shangyin’s Pianwen are certainly typical forms of Pianwen. His articles are theembodiments of using antithesis, rhythm, allusions and embellishment, which have thecharacteristics of allusions intensive, antithesis delicate, focusing embellishments, beinggood at expressing feelings, returning to Six Dynasties parallel style. The third chapter explores the reasons why there are similarities and differencebetween Du Mu and Li Shangyin’s creation, and then preliminarily evaluates theirachievements. On the one hand, the two causes of the similarities are the circumstance ofsociety and literature at that time and the norm of the style itself. On the other hand, thedifference mainly resulted from their different clan backgrounds, thought concepts andpersonal experiences.