| For a long time, there has been a strong relationship between Chinese literature and history. It is such a firm relation that no research of ancient Chinese literary thoughts should neglect it.Although the amount of the Chinese historical books is great and the number of Chinese historians is large, Liu Zhiji (Tang Dynasty) and Zhang Xuecheng (Qing Dynasty) are the only two historians purposely neatened Chinese history and created the theory of Chinese history. Liu Zhiji's -"Shi Tong" in the field of history is as important as Liuxie's "Wen Xin Diao Long" in the field of literature. Furthermore, both Liu Zhiji's "Shi Tong" and Zhang Xuecheng's "Wen Shi Tong Yi" are called together as "the Two Gems in History". Through the research of their historical theory, the contained thoughts of their literary theory can be analyzed. Drawing assistance from history and focusing on literature, valuable ideas from historical field can be used in literary field."Shi Tong" is the first Chinese history theory work. It did a general criticism and made a roundly summarization of the history before Tang Dynasty for the first time. In the view of literary aesthetics, the discovery can be obtained that Liu Zhiji, influenced by the writing style of WeiJin Dynasty, extraordinarily opposed the way that writes historical books in a way of literary writing, therefore, he did a lot of work to distinguish literature from history. What he did devoted to the independence of literature. In the need of event narrating, an advanced theory of narration hadbeen developed in "Shi Tong". This theory is a tremendous contribution to the ancient Chinese literary theory. Especially, for the sake of distinguishing the truth among historical material, Liu Zhiji classified and summarized the development of the Chinese fictions. It made him the founder of Chinese fiction theory.Zhang Xuecheng was not so much a historian and critics as a thinker. When scholars in "Qianlong and Jiaqing period" did textual research diligently, he was thinking about the meaning of the intellectual research. He drew the conclusion that literature and history showed 'Tao"(the rules of the society) by collating research of literature and history. Thus, literature, history and philosophy are combined together, leading to the fundamental social life. So literature and history are bestowed with philosophical meaning, and philosophy is no longer devoid of content. Therefore, basing on "Tao", he discussed literature and history, exploring the essence of literature and history, finding new notions that were not discerned by his predecessors and contemporaries. He introduced the method of collating study, "distinguishing the academic research between its roots and branches ", into literature, exploring literary changes, thus providing new points of view and ways of thinking to the literary development research.Liu Zhiji discussed historical methods, while Zhang Xuecheng talked about historical meaning. Liu Zhiji's historical research was just confined to historical material, highlighting historical literary methodology; Zhang Xuecheng's research, based on history, included history and literature, what's more, even the whole academic fields, focusing on the nature of historical literary methodology. Research of the two scholar's literary thinking theory shows that both of the scholars were historians but their researching focuses and intellectual levels were different, so their research could counterbalance. The combination of the two scholars' literary theory thinking can construct a three-dimensional system of ancient Chinese historical literary theory.Traditional ancient Chinese literary theory can roughly be divided into two categories: the theory of poetry and the theory of article. Due to the long ignoranceof narrative literary works, the ancient literary theory emphasized on the theory of essays and argumentative articles, so the theoretical research on narrative works was few. Chinese ancient historical literary theory system, developed from the h...
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