Study On Continued Immortal Biography By Shen Fen

Taoism, of which basic doctrine and ultimate goal is "leading ordinary people to immortals", plays an indispensable role in Chinese traditional culture. In the past centuries, Taoists preached to the crowd to keep the immortal belief firm in people’s mind, besides, they collected immortal tales from the history and the society consciously to compile books for preaching. Therefore, immortal biographies, a series of literary works which mainly tell fairy tales, came into being among the Taoism classics. The first immortal biography on record is Biographies of Various Immortals, written by Liu Xiang in Han Dynasty, since then many pieces of the works have been published such as Supernatural Biography by Ge Hong in Jin Dynasty and Continued Immortal Biography by Shen Fen during the Five Dynasties, all of which are listed as the representative immortal biographies in the early period of Taoism development. Owing to the newly developed Taoism ideology and flourishing Tang novels, Continued Immortal Biography is characterized by "purposeful consciousness" during the development of immortal biographies, different from the other two pieces of works, and the consciousness is remained in the following immortal biographies, which should be focused on. Continued Immortal Biography, which is insufficient in fairy quantity, still makes a difference on the history of literature and Taoism, however, the specific study on this biography was not so attractive. Probing into the references, author and content, etc., the paper provided a systematic study as follows:Part Ⅰ:Define "immortal biography" and "immortal belief, sort out the present academic study on Continued Immortal Biography, and describe the research value and methods herein.Part Ⅱ:Make a detailed description about the creation, version and author based on the references.Part Ⅲ:Make a study on the reasons of creation process based on its published time and influence caused by the special historical backgrounds and literary development.Part Ⅳ:Describe the literary and historic values of Continued Immortal Biography by analyzing its poetry value and effects on the later novels and operas.Part Ⅴ:Conclude.