Wu Zhen, Historical Criticism

Wu Zhen, a native of Chengdu, famous historian, textual critic of Northern Song Dynasty, was well-known for being good at testing history. It was unfortunate that only"the Correction of New Tang Book"of all Wu Zhen'works was circulated, which represents his principal achievement."The Correction of New Tang Book" had been regarded as the monograph of pure textual criticism all the time, because it aimed at correcting the faults of "New Tang Book" which was written by Ou Yang Xiu and Song Qi. In fact, we can find out "the Correction of New Tang Book" is still a very insightful and penetrating monograph of history category, if we look through the whole book analysing the theory explained by Wu Zhen in the preface of this book and his concrete comment. Meanwhile, the theory of historiography criticism is worthy of studying because it was systematic and novel and absorbed the antecedent achievements. For example, the definition of the historiography criticism of "facts, celebrating and lowering and literary grace" and the theme of "the eight faults" on the compilation of the "New Tang Book" are both worthy of researching. However, the past scholars mostly paid close attention to his achievements of textual criticism, while did little special and systematic research. This thesis tries to probe into the historiography comment of "the Correction of New Tang Book"systematically coming to his theory and mathod and its meaning. Thus we can re-recognize the status of Wu Zhen and his works in the history of Chinese anciennt historiography.The dissertation is divided into three parts: 1. The athor has recommended his life and his real motive to write "the Correction of New Tang Book", and has explained the whole structure of this book from style, the way of writing and structure frame. 2. This part, as the main body of the article, carried on the argumentation from four respects: defining the category and standard of the historiography comment, comment on citing materials, criticism of the compilation of historical books, and the means of Wu Zhen's historiography comment. 3. The comment of Wu Zhen's historiography comment. The author probes into the existing problems on historiography comment of Wu Zhen's,and makes a simple summary of his thoughts of historiography comment.