The Study On Yuan Mei’s Prose And Parallel Prose Theory

Yuan Mei was not only a famous poet in the Qing Dynasty,but also a writer and literary theorist.His literary theory not only enriched the literary circle of the Qing Dynasty,but also was a beneficial supplement to the ancient Chinese literary theory.Since the 20th century,the academic circle has studied Yuan Mei’s literature fully,but there is still a tendency to attach importance to poetics and light on literary theory.This paper intends to make a further study of Yuan Mei’s literary theory on the basis of predecessors’ research.This paper is mainly divided into three parts: introduction,text and conclusion.The introduction makes a theoretical definition of the research scope of Yuan Mei’s literary theory.The research object of this paper refers to the category of literary theory in a narrow sense,which includes only articles.The research scope includes Yuan Mei’s prose and parallel prose theory.The main body will study and explain Yuan Mei’s literary theory from the following four aspects.The first part mainly discusses Yuan Mei ’s prose theory.Yuan Mei advocated taking article as first and polishing it,fighting against the textual research and showing off knowledge,by which he discussed the significance of textual research in article creation.In discussing the accumulation and knowledge of the author,Yuan Mei emphasized learning from excellent examples and accumulating knowledge.In addition,He also discussed the creation under the guidance of the spirit and pursued an aesthetic taste of innumerable twists and turns.The second part mainly discusses Yuan Mei’s parallel prose theory.This part focuses on Yuan Mei’s contributions of defining parallel prose’s name,promoting parallel prose’s stylistic status and clarifying the relationship between prose and parallel prose.The third part mainly discusses the theoretical basis and practical reasons of Yuan Mei’s literary theory with following aspects: the influence of traditional Confucianism,the criticism on the "Confucian orthodoxy" concept of Tongcheng School,the promotion of the trend of thought to sentiment in the late Ming Dynasty and the influence of the eight-part essay.The fourth part discusses the value and significance of Yuan Mei’s literary theory from several aspects,such as pointing out the deficiencies in writing articles,taking artistic dialectics as the methodological paradigm and carrying out the creative practice under the guidance of the creative theory.The conclusion summarizes the whole text.Generally speaking,Yuan Mei’s literary theory,which not only recognizes the diversity of stylistic type,stylistic features and stylistic functions,but also makes some achievements in clarifying the defects and errors of the text,is more specific and rich.However,we can not ignore the shortcomings in his literary theory,such as the gap between some practice and theory,the unclear classification of defects and errors in writing articles and so on.