Study On The Flower In The Mirror From The Perspective Of Qianjia Academic Thoughts

This paper takes The Flower in the Mirror which is one of the four literary novels of the Qing dynasty,as the research object.By placing it in the perspective of the historical background--Qianjia academic trend,and combining with the method of close reading of the text,the study investigates how the novel was influenced by the academic customs of the era,and then interpreted and presented it.The text consists of four chapters.In the first chapter,the author's life,friends and several versions of the novel were discussed.The second chapter talked about how the creation of The Flower in the Mirror presented the context of Qianjia academic trend.The first section focused on the erudite and textual research features of the novel,which is consistent with the academic characteristics of Qianjia era.The second section summarized the contention between the Han school and Song school in the Qing dynasty,taking the contention appearing at the Siku pavilion and the Ruan Yuan shogunate as an example.Furthermore,the paper discussed how the novel made a literary exposition of the debate between Han school and Song school under such an academic background.The third chapter explored the writing of human nature in the novel from the perspective of new philosophical connotations centered on Dai Zhen.The first section introduced the general situation of "new philosophical connotations" as a cultural background.The second section based on Dai's theory "fully expressing emotions and realizing desires",discussed the discourse of Qianjia scholars and their efforts to face up to and liberate human nature,and analysed the theory of human nature in the novel.The third part analysed the feminism trend from the perspective of "transpositional consideration".Dai zhen,Jiao Xun and Yu Zhengxie advocated this theory.Meanwhile,Yu Zhengxie and Li Ruzhen lived at the same era called Jiadao so that they had similar view on women which was ahead of time,surveying women's issues and they sometimes spoke for women.The fourth chapter focused on the relationship between The Flower in the Mirror and the ideological trend of Qianjia school in the Qing dynasty.The first section introduced the tradition of notifying and applying ancient classics during the early Qing dynasty since Gu Yanwu to illustrate its origin.The second sectiondiscusses the specific social topics in the novel.In this part,the author first analysed the plot of river governance in women's nation,then analysed the customs in the novel,and found that under the surface of customs lies the thought schema of "acting by rites" and "governing by rites".