The Reception Study Of Shih-chi By Tang-song School

With the upsurge of the antiquarian trend of literature in the mid-Ming Dynasty,restoration and revolution became the spirit of the times,and the retro literary schools emerged.Represented by essayists such as Wang Shenzhong,Tang Shunzhi,Mao Kun,and Gui Youguang,there was the Tang-Song School for imitating the works of Tang and Song Dynasties,which was contrasted with the Qin-Han School composed by the “former seven literati” and “later seven Literati”.The Tang-Song School was a kind of prose school which mainly learned from the works in Tang-Song period,while Shih-chi was the classic in Qin-Han period,which was the weapon of the Qin-Han School for advocating restoration.Thus the two schools made a connection in the context of restoration in mid-Ming Dynasty.The Tang-Song School highly respected Shih-chi.They not only referred it in their proses more than once,but made comments or excepted from Shih-chi.In fact,the reason they modeled the works of Tang and Song Dynasties was to eventually grasp the tenor of the six classics and date back to the traditions of ancient prose though the works in Qin and Han Dynasties.From the holistic perspective of literature and culture in the middle and late period of Ming Dynasty,the Tang-Song School and the Qin-Han School both praised Shih-chi.They both affirmed the literary value of Shih-chi and attached great importance to the aesthetic art of Shih-chi,which embodied the sameness of their restoration.As for the contents,the Qin-Han School mainly imitated the rhetoric of Shih-chi by focusing on its syntax and the art of composition.By contrast,the Tang-Song School digged into the essence of Shih-chi through its words and discovered “the Shih-chi Demeanour”,which went further than the Qin-Han School.Meanwhile,the genre nature of the Tang-Song School and the literary nature of Shi-chi also determined the nature of the acceptance of Shih-chi,which means it was a kind of acceptance that the Neo-Confucianism writers accepted the emotional literature,and it was a kind of active acceptance after filtering and transformation,which was different from the passive acceptance of the Qin-Han School.The Tang-Song School transcended the superficial plane of rhetoric and researched Shih-chi through “the theory of demeanour” to discover the narrative art of Shih-chi as a biography and the consistent demeanour shared by works in Tang-Song period and Shih-chi.Thus it opened up a retro approach of dating back to works in Qin-Han period from Tang-Song period,and provided a new direction for later restoration.Their acceptance was not only the interpretation of Shih-chi,but also in turn affected their own prose creation.They borrowed its writing spirit,learned from its rhetoric,and made a well equilibrium between the demeanour and the emotional expression.Thus the Tang-Song School formed their own aesthetic standards,and their proses were well known in the literary world of Ming Dynasty for natural and sincere characteristics.