Xiong Lian Research

Xiong Lian, a writer of Rugao in Qing Dynasty, has poetry, Ci, prose, Fu, and notes and comments on poetry handed down, but the later three kinds of writing seldom draw researchers’attention. As an educated woman, Xiong Lian was economically independent, pursued personality and took her teacher Jiang Gan, and Uncle Xu Xiangpu, et al., as an example to seek elegance as traditional Chinese literati. Harboring a deep understanding towards life, Xiong Lian not only held a sad traditional feeling for the time gone by, but also was critical of life, and thought of living predicaments of women, looking for a sense of being of talented women. It is her personality that made her had few like-minded friends. Finally, she died at an early age, sharing the same fate with lots of talents in ancient China. Although she once tried to get rid of secular world in the way of traveling, finding hopes in immortals, she can’t avoid the suffering from the real world due to her delicate emotion. Taken her miserable marriage as the keynote of her work, she wrote articles with a strong life experience mainly to recall days with her mother, miss past happy time, and depict object for mediating on the past. All her works expressed her regret for her inability of repay, praise and pursuit of noble character and independent personality, and helplessness to eliminate loneliness. She has her own writing style, with unique poetic image group and straightforward expression in poetry, elegant and refined words in Fu, and a large number of allusions in prose. Most people think that Xiong Lian had no verse about love, but in a matter of fact, she expressed her longing for love implicitly. Besides, we could take a critical view on Zhouyi’s comments on Xiong Lian. Actually, Xiong Lian advocated a kind of natural spirit in her poetry, emphasized artificial auxiliary function and visible artistic conception theory, hold objective evaluation standards, and pay attention to the combination of emotion and scene.