A New Study On Wen Tong

This thesis shows a comprehensive study on Wen Tong and his literary works by carefully reviewing various early comments. Both achievements and limitations are discussed. After being more specific about Wen Tong’s reception history, we try to explain why he failed to have a great influence on later generations.The body of this thesis falls into three parts. Chapter One analyzes Wen Tong’s thoughts and characters. Although attained quite highly in both Taoism and Buddhism, Wen Tong never forgot his primary identity as an official. His literary works show us a cautious scholar official that always concealed his ability, paid great attention to the rules and kept out of politics.The second chapter focuses on Wen Tong’s poetry. His folk songs and his works modelled after The Songs of the South should undoubtedly occupy a place in the developing history of Chinese literature. In terms of poems, poems with six characters to a line and poems about gardens, Wen Tong showed his remarkable originality, too. Wen Tong preferred to forms of pre-Tang poetry and it was also generally approved in the Song Dynasty. However, his regulated verse had become more popular since Ming Dynasty. Wen Tong wrote various types of poems and some of them were not impressive enough.Chapter Three selects several representative examples such as Ming Dynasty mentioned above to illustrate Wen Tong’s influence on later generations. It seems that Wen Tong was deeper understood in Korea than Japan, even though both of them claimed to have their own Wen Yuke. Two newly found transcripts signed Wen Tong in Shanghai Library also help to understand him better.In conclusion, lots of factors, namely his own personality and the fate of his family, the pattern of both his literary works and the writing of literary history, and all kinds of misunderstandings in the spreading process, make Wen Tong unknown to public afterwards. As a matter of fact, Wen Tong’s literary achievements are far from his ink bamboos.