The Study On The Miscellaneous Notes Of Northern Song Dynasty

While scholars’attention was mostly drawn to the studies on poetry, ci’and prose of Song dynasty in the twentieth century, it had been relatively silent on topic of miscellaneous notes (biji) of Song dynasty. However, the 1990s has been witnessing the rapid increase of interest in biji, resulting in more publications with excellent views and explanation, especially the Collection of biji of Song dynasty, which is gathered, compiled and presented by Shanghai Normal University. Despite of those achievements, I believe it’s necessary to do a comprehensive study on the biji of Song dynasty.As the textual legacy of the biji of northern Song dynasty are gathered and compiled by traditional bibliographers and contemporary scholars. It will be used as the basic material and inspiration of my thesis. Following an outline of writing background of biji and writing feature, I’ll begin by examining achievements and mentality of those biji writers. Next I’ll assess biji’s role in Chinese literary history.My thesis consists of three chapters as follows. The first chapter focuses on the outline of the biji and other relevant issues, which is largely related to the transformation during late Tang dynasty and Song dynasty. The second chapter will deal with the difference between scholar officials, Jianghu elites2 and hermits, both of whom had written biji during Northern Song dynasty. It also argues that the identity of biji writers differs, primarily due to their different birth era, which may objectively influence their life experiences. Take an instance, while some writers were born and grew up in Five dynasties (907-960), which then were conquest and replaced by Song dynasty, some others didn’t experience regime change. According to the colophon, preface and content of each writing, I’ll analyze those writers’mental state and writing motivate, through which the fresh style of biji may be better understood. The third chapter will claim that biji played an important role in conserving textual legacy as literary criticism. In addition, biji will be considered as literary work with its writing theory and narrative features.Through revealing the authorship identification, analyzing the content of the writing, this thesis will present writing features of biji, textual meaning of biji, which can be a great contribution towards a better understand of a cohesive literary history of Northern Song dynasty.