The Chronology Of The Proses Of Early Tang Dynasty

There were a galaxy of literary genres in the arena of literature over the period of the early Tang dynasty, such as poetry, prose poem, preface, epitaph, document, political commentary etc. The subject of this dissertation is primarily focused on the prose of varied styles: prose, parallel prose, and all the rhymed texts other than poetry. To this end, these well-polished and highly-stylized texts had been categorized and chronologized; meanwhile, by drawing upon the important findings achieved by our predecessors, we had further corrected and supplemented some of the most important proses penned by the elite literati. On this basis, these texts had also been systematically examined in terms of their backdrop which includes the events of pitch and moment of that time, the government polices on literature and art, the political system, the schools of the writers as well as their anecdotes, and other relevant historical facts. This dissertation is composed of two parts: Introduction and the Main Body. The former covers the analysis of the societal background against which these proses were composed and the summary that epitomizes the general development of writings of early Tang Dynasty. The latter, viz. the main body of this dissertation, is ordered lengthwise on a timeline by year ranging from the first year of Wude of the reign of Emperor Tang Gao-Zu to the second year of Xiantian of the reign of Emperor Tang Xuan-Zong and across this timeline are the authors galore who had been respectively reviewed item by item and month by month. Furthermore, to find answers to such important questions pertaining to the chronological life of some authors of the first order at that time or the chronology of their works, we had maximized the use of all the available correlated research results of great significance at home and abroad and as a result culled the crème de la crème of them. In light of the authors whose life histories still remain a puzzle, their proses are presumably tied to the years of their decease; as regards the proses whereof the writing time is uncertain and unspecific, they are approximately timed at the low end of the estimated range of years.