Origins Of Wang Chong’s Literary Thoughts

Wang Chong’s On Balance as a masterpiece of Eclectics in Han Dynasty absorbed widespread quintessence of Scholars and formed his unique theory. Since modern times, On Balance has attracted more and more attention in academia. The research direction of the book has gradually broadened its focus from philosophy to politics, pedagogy, psychics, literature, historiography, even natural science and so on.Return to the text, the literary achievements and literary ideas of On Balance can’t be ignored. The literary ideas in On Balance were originated from the literary ideas of Scholars which was both being inherited and criticized. On the basic of various theories, Wang Chong built his distinct literature theory with the Eclectics style. These years, the literary ideas of On Balance had been in-depth studied. The works of researchers mostly concentrated on the concept of true beauty, creative spirit, utilitarianism and writer’s cultivation. These works evaluated and analyzed Wang Chong’s literary ideas based on his philosophical thought. At present, there is still no original articles about the affiliation of Wang Chong’s literary ideas. My thesis is trying to make links between On Balance and Scholars on literary ideas, exploring the origin of thought, analyzing the learning belonging.This subject has three parts in the text: 1. Overviewing the acceptance of Wang’s literary ideas in ancient times and the research status of Wang’s literary ideas since modern times. This is what Chapter One describes. 2. Exploring and analyzing the relationship of Wang Chong and Scholars during Qin and Han dynasty on literary ideas, especially Confucianism, Taoists and Legalists. By means of comparing the similarity, we can discriminate inheritance relationship. They belong to Chapter Two to Four. 3. Expounding from the compound of Wang Chong’s literary ideas and the relationship between Wang and Eclectics. There’s no doubt that the identity of Wang Chong is an Eclectics. From the feature of collection which belongs to Eclectics, we can analyze Wang Chong’s literary ideas. I’ll also discuss Wang’s study on Mohist, Logicians, Astrologist, Political Strategists meanwhile. On this way, we can explore Wang Chong’s literary ideas further. This is the last part of my thesis.