Research On The Use And Influence Of The Lienvzhuan(列女传) Before Tang Dynasty

The title of this paper is Research on the use and influence of the lienvzhuan(列女传)before Tang Dynasty.Written by Liu Xiang in 16 BC,when he was sorting out the royal collection,The Lienvzhuan is a book specially records of women’s deeds.This paper mainly combs the spread of the Lienvzhuan from the 16 BC to the establishment of Tang Dynasty(618 AD),and explore the causes of this spread in depth.According to the analysis of related materials,the spread of the Lienvzhuan before Tang Dynasty can be roughly divided into four periods:from 16 BC to the demise of the Western Han Dynasty,it was the initial period of the spread of the Lienvzhuan;the Eastern Han Dynasty is the development period of it;the Wei and Jin Dynasties were its prosperous period;The decay period of it was from the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Sui Dynasty.According to the book’s spreading situation,the paper’s structure designed as following:The first chapter focuses on the book-forming features of the Lienvzhuan and its use and influence in the Western Han Dynasty.This chapter considers the contradictory nature of the transmission of the Lienvzhuan from the day it was written.Its contradictions include two aspects.on the one hand,as one of the royal collection compiled by Liu Xiang,the Lienvzhuan has carried the heavy responsibility of "warning the emperor" since it birth,which limits the spread of it;on the other hand,in some way,the integrity and systematization of the Lienvzhuan has promoted its own dissemination.Actually,the latter characteristic beats the former one,which makes the book spread quickly in the society and made some impact on that time.As an official collection compiled by Liu Xiang,the Lienvzhuan was read by the emperor and some noble bureaucrats after the earliest reader,Liu Xiang,had proofread and rewritten it.And then,some chapters of this book spread to the then Donghai County and has been read by some local bureaucrats.At this time,the Lienvzhuan not only exerted a subtle exhortation on the life of the emperor in the form of a screen pattern,but also had a profound influence on the Ban family as the rewarded book.The second chapter focuses on the use and influence of the Lienvzhuan in the Eastern Han Dynasty.This chapter holds that the two main ways of using the Lienvzhuan in the Eastern Han Dynasty were poetic quotations and scholarly commentaries,which laid the foundation for the use of the Lienvzhuan in later times.Among them,the number of poems quoting the story of the Lienvzhuan is high,and the genre is richer,involving five genres of texts,including rhetoric,official documents,proverbs,preface and tombstone.Cai Yong is a representative of this period,and he has a relatively large number of related poems and texts.The commentaries of Ban Zhao and Ma Rong facilitated the circulation of the Lienvzhuan.Ban’s annotated-version of The Legend of the Women changed from eight to fifteen.During the Eastern Han Dynasty,apart from being painted on screens,the Lienvzhuan was also decorated in the tombs.Some new phenomena,such as the continuation of the Lienvzhuan were numerous at this time.So profound influence it had that its title also appears on Han Dynasty’s bamboo slips from Dunhuang.Most importantly,the Lienvzhuan had a significant impact on the words and actions of the noble women of the Eastern Han Dynasty,which has led to a major shift in the distributors of the book:after the middle and late Eastern Han Dynasty,with the solar together,the female group changed from the initial recipients to active communicators,and they promoted the dissemination of the Lienvzhuan with their own practical actions.The third chapter focuses on the use and influence of the Lienvzhuan in the Wei and Jin dynasties.During the Wei and Jin dynasties,the use of Lienvzhuan basically continued the way it was used in the Eastern Han Dynasty,but the number and variety of related poems and texts have increased.For example,four new genres of essays were added,such as mourning,biography exposition and some essays.As the Eastern Han Dynasty,the Lienvzhuan also has two commentaries in this period.Comparing with the Eastern Han Dynasty,the influence of the Lienvzhuan deepened in the Wei and Jin dynasties.Although there is no record of decoration in tombs from this period,the Lienvzhuan is still painted on the walls of the palace,and was still the standard for noble women’s words and behavior,as well as still had a subtle influence on the lives of the people of the time.In this period,the continuation of the Lienvzhuan was no longer a single supplement like the Eastern Han Dynasty,but the creation of a work of the same name.Under the social atmosphere of character evaluation,the Lienvzhuan also influenced the ode and Moxie in the Wei and Jin dynasties,producing the creative phenomenon of re-commenting on the stories of the Lienvzhuan.The fourth chapter focuses on the use and influence of the Lienvzhuan in the Northern and Southern Dynasties.The phenomenon of scholarly exegesis in the Eastern Han Dynasty and Wei Jin periods is no longer seen in the Northern and Southern Dynasties.In this period,the use of the Lienvzhuan continued the way of being quoted by poems and texts in the earlier period,and its new application,which means quoting it to annotate other books.During this period,new forms of related poetic genres emerged,such as letters about Buddhism.Pei Yin,Pei Songzhi,Li Daoyuan and others have quoted the Lienvzhuan to comment on the previous book.This behavior not only opened the way for the solar in Tang Dynasty,such as Li Shan,to cite and annotated others provious books,but revealed the decay of the dissemination of the Lienvzhuan in this period.The influence of the Lienvzhuan in the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties was not beyond the scope of the previous generation.In the forms of texts or drawings,the Lienvzhuan appeared in the lives,houses and tombs of the ruling class and had a influence on their lives.At the same time,the phenomenon that creating the book’s eponymous works existed.The fifth chapter focuses on the causes of the use of the Lienvzhuan before the Tang Dynasty.This chapter argues that the circulation and use of the Lienvzhuan before the Tang Dynasty was driven by the continuous change of social thought.Roughly speaking,during the two Han dynasties,the Biography of Women was influenced by numerous factors,such as the need of building a ritual system,the setting of women in Jinwenjingxue(今文经学)and the social situation of the dictatorship of women in the late Eastern Han dynasty,thus establishing the use of the Lienvzhuan by the later generations.During the Wei and Jin dynasties,the frequency of using the Lienvzhuan increased due to the need to conform to the character assessment of Xuanxue(玄学),the improvement of the social status of scholarly women and the flourishing of figure painting.By the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties,the use of the Lienvzhuan reduced due to the delay of frequent wars and the ideas of restraint of desire and the pursuit of good fortune in Buddhism.