On Pei Songzhi 's "Three Kingdoms" From The Perspective Of Literary History

The dissertation aims to probe into the fundamental reason why Pei Songzhi created the book Commentaries on Standard History of the Three Kingdoms, taking its rich literary color as the breakthrough point, and Pei Songzhi’s views on historiography and literature and the development of the division of literature and historiography and their relationship as the clue. Great academic achievements had been achieved by numerous scholars, for the diversities of understandings and interpretations of the book from different angles and perspectives, but most of them were mainly limited in several aspects, such as historiography, philology and linguistics. But there was not a sufficient and systematic study on why Pei Songzhi made the notes and why there was a fundamental difference between Pei Songzhi’s annotation and historiographical annotation. In this field only some scholars such as ChenYinke made a certain studies but questions till remain. Hu Baoguo opened a new road and made great achievements in the research from the angle of the change of academic atmosphere. However, why Chen Shou wrote the book Standard History of the Three Kingdoms so concisely and why Pei Songzhi cited so many historical materials to annotate it still need a further discussion. Thus, the dissertation had conducted a tentative study to reveal the fundamental reason for Pei Songzhi’ s creation of Commentaries on Standard History of the Three Kingdoms. My research focuses on the aspects of the development of the division of literature and historiography, the influence of thinking of the times and so on, in order to broaden the research field of vision and tentatively provide a new perspective for the crossover study of literature and historiography.The book Standard History of the Three Kingdoms written by Chen Shou had received unanimous praises, from its completion to Liu Song Dynasty, when Emperor Song Wen firstly pointed out that it was too sketchy and thus ordered Pei Songzhi to make an annotation. Therefore, Pei Songzhi added a lot of historical materials, adopted the different ways of annotation from the traditional classical one, and as a result, his style was highly praised by Emperor Song Wen. At that time, people’s views in historiography changed a lot, which differed completely from Chen Shou’s. Thus, compared with Standard History of the Three Kingdoms, the specialties of Commentaries on Standard History of the Three Kingdoms can be summarized as follows: the activated description of historical events and historical figures. Pei Songzhi made a lively and careful description of history scenes and historical figures and adopted various literary and artistic skills to highlight the individual characteristics of historical figures and presented their true selves in societies, in order to make the rigid and rigescent figures become vivid, lifelike, lovely and vivacious. In this way, Pei Songzhi expressed his own opinions of history by the form of annotation.The reason that Pei Songzhi made plentiful annotation and vivid characters is mainly related to his viewpoints on historiography that differs from Chen shou’s: Chen shou, as a historian, wrote the history by the principle of historiography; meanwhile, as a member of aristocratic family infected by the times, such as Scholar’s awakening of individual consciousness, Pei Songzhi shared different viewpoints from Chen shou’s on historical figures. In his minds, history should be full of flesh and blood, tears and sorrow, joy and life, so how the history should be activated and restored vividly are very important to him. Thus, these are the two different perspectives on historiography for Chen shou and Pei Songzhi.Literature and historiography in Wei-Jin Dynasty broke away from the shackles of Classics and tended to each other’s independence, showing the different characteristics of their respective disciplines. Chen Shou objectively narrated the turbulent and complex history of the Three Kingdoms in a plain and simple language, in accordance with the requirements of historiography. However, the tortuous independence of literature and historiography called for the association of the two. In this period literature associated with historiography, and the impact of literature on historiography was far greater than the impact of historiography on literature. Under the influence Pei Songzhi changed his perspective of history. While narrating the progress of the history, he responsibly revealed the personality and connotation of historical figures and reflected their poise and temperament from the aspect of literature on the basis of objective and reality. So both of them described the same period of history in different styles. According to Pei Songzhi’s ideas, there were no essential descriptions in Chen shou’s narration on the history of Three Kingdoms, which should be full of detailed life and daily things. These should be considered as primary causes why Pei thought of Standard History of the Three Kingdoms as sketchy, why he tried to annotate the book and why his annotation was rich and vivid.