A Comparative Study Of The Biographies Of The Poets In Tang Dynasty

The Biographies of Talents in Tang Dynasty, written by Xin Wenfang from Yuan Dynasty, was the first biography collection of poets in Tang Dynasty. The biographies of poets in both The Old Book of Tang History and The New Book of Tang History are endowed with not only historic values, but also literary merits, which will be greatly beneficial to research literary situations at that time. Different versions of The Book of Tang History and The Biographies of Talents in Tang Dynasty are collected as the research targets (The Old Book of Tang History and The New Book of Tang History, published in 1975 by Zhonghua Book Company; The Biographies of Talents in Tang Dynasty, edited by Fu Xuanzong and published in 1990 by Zhonghua Book Company). A comparing study will be carried on all of these three books with the aim of finding the biographies of the same poet. The essay chooses same biographies of 59 poets who are described in all of the three books, from which could tell the significance and representativeness do they enjoy in literary history. Comparing the three biography versions the same poet could furthest draw a picture of the real personalities of the protagonist. From different versions of biographies, different character images will appear and the reasons of that could be discussed from different perspectives, which will indicate different aims of creating the literary work from different authors. Through this research, the essay will analyse the literary merits of these works, the changes of Poetics in different dynasties, and the complementary and contradiction of different historical materials in the three books.