A Study On Yuan Mei's Proses

Yuan Mei was an outstanding writer of the metaphase of the Qing Dynasty. It is well known that Yuan Mei was an excellent poet and poetic theorist. In the meantime, he was also a superminent proser, and had been praised by many writers of that time,such as Shu Wei and Cheng Jinfang. Yuan Mei himself was also self-confident, he considered himself no worse than the Three Great Proser of the Qing Dynasty.Yuan Mei's proses could be classified into two categories on his own view: the proses written in the classical literary style and the correspondences. Yuan Mei thought highly of his proses written in the classical style and expressed his ideal to revitalize it in many of his articles. In order to make his ideal into reality, Yuan Mei proposed to restore the classic ways in the proses. He said that good proses should learn the classical masterpieces and reflected the writer's ideal. The premise of the restoring was to resist the contemprary's malpractices. He criticized many malpractices which destroyed the purity of the prose, the worst ones of which were the New Confucian, the Ba Gu Prose and the Textual Research. There was a great difference between Yuan Mei's theory on his proses and poetics. The latter was featured with making creations, but the former was featured with sticking to the old ways.The Tong Cheng Group reached it's prosperity in Qian Long period of the Qing Dynasty. Bing laid over rays of light of it, Yuan Mei shared many points of view with it. However, he criticized many important theories of the Tong Cheng Group. Firstly, the Tong Cheng Group canonized the New Confucian of Cheng and Zhu, but Yuan Mei resisted it. Secondly, the Tong Cheng Group proposed a theory of "tradition of ancient proses", they conjectured the ancient proses by the formality of the Ba Gu Prose. As a result, they emphasized the "principles" of the prose. Yuan Mei displayed an attitude of contemptation on these "principles", he advocated that there were no convenient patterns to apply mechanically, on the contrary, the writers must have there own digestion and ponderation from the ancient proses. Thirdly, Fang Baoadvocated that ancient proses should be "elegant", Yuan Mei shared his view, but his requestion was not so strict.We can classify Yuan Mei's proses into six categories: biography, lyric proses, commentting proses, travel notes, "six notes of Sui Yuan", correspondences. Biographies shared a large amount of Yuan Mei's collected works and was very important for Yuan Mei; lyric proses were full of sentimental influence; commentting proses expressed Yuan Mei's rebelling spirit and careful thinking which reflected his aspect as a great thinker; travel notes shared his "xing ling theory" of the poetics; "six notes of Sui Yuan" narrated the process of the Sui Yuan's renovating; correspondences reflected his personality and made great achievements.