Zheng Zhenduo's Studies On The History Of Chinese Literary Criticism

Zheng Zhenduo was a famous scholar of the first half of the twentieth century who made some contributions to the study on the history of Chinese literary criticism.Up to the pre-Qin Dynasty and down to the Qing Dynasty, Zheng Zhenduo's studies covered the whole history of Chinese literary criticism and depicted simply the developing history of Chinese literary criticism. He divided the history of Chinese literary criticism into three periods: the beginning (from Qin to Wei , Jin and Nan Bei Chao),the rebirth (covering mainly the literary criticism of Tang and Song Dynasties) and the development (the literary criticism of Yan and Ming Dynasties). Zheng Zhenduo criticized the approaches of Chinese literary criticism, its disadvantages of farfetching, scattering at will and the understanding of the sentence according to the divisions of the words and put forward the study methodology for Chinese literary criticism. His methodology stressed the scientific spirits of connection, comparison, demonstration, inducing and reasoning.In addition, Zheng Zhenduo studies in detail some special topics. Firstly he elaborated the bad influence of The Preface to Mao's Poems to Shi Jing, textual researching the author of The Preface to Mao's Poems and putting forward a new classification for Shi Jing. Secondly, he elaborated the processes of thriving and developing of "Gu Wen Movement" of the Tang Dynasty and the success of Han Yu and evaluated them on the whole. Finally, he elaborated the thriving, declining and classification of literary trends of thoughts of the Ming Dynasty and the representing characteristics of the trends of thoughts and he also evaluated them.Compared with the founders of the study on the history of Chinese literary criticism, Zheng Zhenduo has made two special contributions: he put the critical theories of novels and plays into the scope of Chinese...