A Study On GaoGong’s Literary Theories

Gaogong is a famous politician and thinker in mid-Ming dynasty, who has a great achievement in literature, too. As a politician, gaogong suggests that poems and articles are beneficial to the governance. He encourages concise and real style of writing, and not advocates numerous words. As the prime minister, his literature thoughts maintain highly consistent with government cultural policy, and show a kind of official literary thought. For the "article", in the ri jin zhi jiang, Gaogong claims that "article" is a tool to convey ethics, and expresses the literary concept of "writings are meant to convey ethics". Gaogong argues that ethics and literature are both important, and ethics is the first thing to emphasize. Only achieving both have great ethics and writing capacity can people cultivate themselves, put family in order, administer a country and make the world peace. Gaogong’s literary theories are not only reflected in the letters to the emperor about cultural policy, also reflected in his work largely. This article is based on the corpus of Gaogong.When I read the corpus of Gaogong carefully, I have combed the literary theories of it. Through the focus on his works, explore the literary connotation behind his work. Viewed overall, literary theories were presented in gaogong’s works are official literar y concept. Most of them are appeared in the official discourse and public discourse sp ace.