"the Art Of War" Text Study

The Art of War is well known as a classic book of military science and has important status in military history of our country. With the interpretation of military theory, the Art of War also objectively presented some distinctive characteristics in terms of the text itself. So the Art of War is not only a military works but also a famous literature. According to the above, this paper has made a further study on the text of this book, and elaborated its ideological content, the artistic achievement, the esthetic characteristic and the influences.This paper includes six parts. In the first part, the author Sun Wu and the formation of this book are introduced. According to reliable historical materials, textual research on the surname and personal name, birth and death years, original family home, family history and personal deeds especially things about battle management of Sun Wu are carried out in this section. From this the impact of his war thinking on this book and its formation process can be seen. At the same time the age, the formation process and the popular versions of this book are analyzed in detail In the second part, the ideological connotations of the Art of War are discussed.The detailed research has been made on the military thoughts, philosophic thoughts, and Qi Wu cultural thoughts in this study. As a military book, the Art of War contains a wealth of military thoughts, wise philosophic thoughts and cultural thoughts of Qi country.In the third part, the structural characteristics of the Art of War are discussed. The structure of the Art of War has made non-ignorable achievement in development of the pre-Qin literature. This section has analyzed its structural features from several aspects such as the whole book, chapters, titles, and sentence patterns.In the fourth part, the language features of the Art of War are studied. This section focuses on the style and rhetoric to explain language features of the Art of War and discussed its development and breakthroughs in language. In the fifth part, the aesthetic characteristics of the Art of War has been analyzed mainly from five aspects, such as the perfection of triumph, hardness and softness combination, emptiness-solidity relationship, harmony of human with nature, flexibility.In the sixth part, the impact of the Art of War has been discussed.