Research On The Art Of "Eight-legged" Essay Rhetorical

“Eight-legged essay”was a literal style adopted by imperial civilexaminations from the Ming to Qing dynasty. It not only works as thebasic document in the research on ancient imperial examination system,but also plays a crucial role in the development of ancient Chinese.Besides, as a corpus,“eight-legged essay” is a type of significant datumin the rhetorical research.Based on the feasibility and necessity of eight-legged essayrhetorical research, this dissertation will explore the art of eight-leggedessay rhetoric from three aspects, namely, phrases,sentences and chapters,adopting methods such as comparison, statistics and quantitative research.The whole structure is divided into four parts. In the first chapter,“The introduction of eight-legged essay rhetoric’characteristics”, throughsorting concepts of “negative rhetoric”and “positive rhetoric”, it connectseight-legged essay and the rhetorical theory, emphasizing the feasibilityand necessity of this research. The second chapter is “Refining uponphrases”. In this chapter, it cites examples which show the flexibleapplication of phrases from selected texts. Meanwhile, it presents therhetorical effect via analyzing phrases’flexible application. The thirdchapter is “The selection of sentences”.According to the system analysison the usage of complex sentences, ellipsis, rhetorical question in eight-legged essay, it points that the appearance of those phenomenons isdue to the rhetorical effect which eight-legged essay itself has. The forthpart is “The rhetoric of wittings”. This part focuses on an analysis of theeight-legged essay’coherent structure. From this analysis, it explores theimportant role of special essay structure when it is used to proveargumentative writings. Besides, from chapter two to four, the method ofstatistics is used to count the usage of the rhetoric in selected corpus. Onthe other hand, the quantitative research is utilized to prove the positiverole caused by special rhetoric in eight-legged essay. On the basis ofabove analyses, this dissertation emphasize the crucial meaning ofpositive rhetoric in argumentative writings.