The Research Of Gu Qian And His Literary Works

Gu Qian was an imperial literati of Jiangnan region in the early Qing Dynasty.He had once been governor of Henan,and he also had a wide range of friends and abundant literary works.As a secondary official,Gu Qian’s literary creation was obviously influenced by the mainstream ideology at that time,which that his poetry adhered to a view of being “tender and gentle” for didactical functions,and his prose advocated the righteous and sincere style under the trend of pragmatism.Although his creative personality had been somewhat repressed,Gu Qian,with his profound talent and knowledge,had created exquisite works in narrative poems,and even become a pioneer in the combination of parallel and prose of Ci Fu.But at present,there is only scattered research on him,especially in the field of prose,which is almost blank,so in order to give him an objective evaluation in the literature history,this thesis will study on his literary works and analyze his individual character by perusing his collected creations.This thesis includes eight parts: introduction,five chapters of the text,conclusion,and appendix.The introduction briefly describes the reasons for choosing this topic,the current research situation and so on.The first chapter refers to Gu Qian’s lifetime experience which is divided into four stages based on his political career.The second chapter pays attention to Gu Qian’s friendship,from the perspective of the mentality of“seclusion within court”,it can be classified into scholar-officials and secluded-literatus.The third chapter is about Gu Qian’s literary proposition,including poetic proposition and prose proposition,which is based on Confucian pragmatic ideology,and incidentally his acceptance of mainstream literary thought is discussed too.The poetry proposition mainly explains the three aspects of “poetry with correct poeticalness and disposition”,“learning from the ancients freely” and “only excellent works cannot be trapped in adversity”,while prose proposition specifically analyzes the ontology of“expounding in writing for making contributions to the world”,the creation theory of“taking me as the ancients,taking the ancients as me”,and the style theory of “the prose is related to one’s personality”.The fourth chapter is Gu Qian’s poetry creation,and according to its function,the first section of poetry content is classified into two categories,one is imperially-assigned poems and reciprocating poems with social functions,and the other is narrative,feeling,landscape and religious poetry that express the lyrical function;the second section interprets the artistic features of his poetry from moderate style,ingenious but natural language,elegant imagery,bright colors and frequent digital words.The fifth chapter is the study of Gu Qian’s prose creation,the first section introduces Ci Fu with rich sentence patterns;the second section describes a robust style of argumentation,the third section analyzes rational preface and postscript,the fourth section evaluates other prose works such as exposition,fund-raising initiative,lament,etc.The epilogue of the thesis tries to summarize Gu Qian’s values in literary history.In the appendix,the lost poems and chronicle of Gu Qian are sorted out.