A Preliminary Study Of "Gu Wen Yuan"

"GuWenYuan" is a literary selection which collects 264 literary works from East Zhou Dynasty to Nan Dynasty. These poems and essays are all not selected by "Wen Xuan" and writers' biography in history .so it is of great value to collating and compiling the literary works in Wei,Jin,Nan,Bei Dynasty .Scholars in Ming,Qing Dynasty always took the works in this selection when they edited a writer's literary anthology in Wei,Jin,Nan,Bei Dynasty .At the same time, this literary selection had many doubtful points. For example, people didn't know the actual edited time of this book. It was said that this literary anthology was found in a shrine by SunZhu who was a literati in North Song Dynasty. According to his viewpoint, this book was compiled by an anonymous scholar in Tang Dynasty . Up to now ,the edited time of "GuWenYuan" was still not defined.So I took this problem into account in this thesis firstly and had proved that this selection was not compiled in Tang Dynasty but in Song Dynasty.Secondly, this thesis discussed the compiling purpose and the stylistic rules and layout of this selection.Thirdly, ancient scholars always considered that the literary works in "GuWenYuan" had been deleted just like those in reference books suchas "YiWenLeiJu" and "ChuXueJi" ect. After comparing the text in "GuWenYuan" with "YiWenLeiJu" and "ChuXueJi", I concluded that the text in "GuWenYuan" was not an abbreviated version.