From Wei and Jin Dynasties to Tang Dynasty, the word "article" was used to refer to all kinds of writers, and its meaning was not much different from that of "article". This situation is not taken seriously. In ancient times, "Wen" itself meant a mixture of literary talents. "Under the copula of Yi": "Mixed, hence the saying." Han Note: "Stiffness and softness are intertwined, and metaphysics and yellow are mixed." Rites and Music: "Write in five colors without confusion." On the other hand, "miscellaneous" also refers to the mutual collocation of various colors. Shuowen said: "Miscellaneous, five picks are combined." Everything is made up of different elements. Ming metabolism "preface to five miscellaneous notes": "Five elements are miscellaneous, five colors are miscellaneous, five sounds are miscellaneous, and five flavors are omnivorous." In this sense, essays can be used to refer to literary articles. The meaning of "essays" is similar to that of articles and chapters. Judging from the documents of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the concept of "essays" has been widely used. For example, Ge Hong's "Huang Bai in Bao Puzi": "I have written more than 200 volumes of foreign essays, which is enough to send a message to future generations, so it is unnecessary." It's just that the essays written here are not as good as other styles, and this essay may have the significance of referring to various articles. Sui Shu Jing Ji Zhi records nine volumes of Liang Wudi's Essays and three volumes of Liang Dynasty's Essays, but its significance is not detailed, but it probably refers to various articles. A more important and reliable example is the classification of "essays" in the large-scale book Lei Ju of Literature and Art compiled by Ou Yangxun and others in the early Tang Dynasty. The book consists of 55 to 58 volumes of essays, including classics, lectures, reading, historical biography, preface, poetry, fu, Qi, Shu, pen, paper, inkstone and so on. It can be seen that "Wen" in "Yi Wen Lei Ju" mainly refers to various articles including poems and fu, which should be inherited from some stylistic classification traditions since the Southern Dynasties. Of course, the classics, lectures, books, pens and inkstones in the "Essays Department" of Yiwenhui cannot be equated with the style of articles, but it is also closely related to the writing of various articles. More precisely, the "essay section" of Selected Works is centered on the style of the article, including related words, books and characters. In the Tang dynasty, this essay, that is, the connotation of the article, was still used by the government. The imperial examination in Tang Dynasty is mainly divided into three parts: Ming Jing, Jinshi and Imperial Examination. There is an "article" item in the Jinshi exam, which is a supplement to the trial strategy and mainly examines the candidates' article ability. It includes poetry, fu, fu and discussion. "Selected Records of the New Tang Dynasty" records: "Today and tomorrow, the imperial edict will get more than six points from the rough test posts, and the scholars will try two articles, while those who know the law will try the strategy." Supplement 4 of Wang Song Shu to Tang Yulin: "Anyone who tries essays has a poem and a poem, or tries to praise and discuss, and the topic is more quiet." In the Ming Dynasty, Hu Zhenheng recorded in Volume 18 of Tang Yin Gui Qian that "Jinshi was old and true": "Tang Jinshi stopped at the beginning. In the process of revealing, I began to try to stick to the classics, pass through the classics and try to write essays, which are called regular poetry prose, that is, poetry and fu. Prose is easy to read. Try it. Every three games. After that, try the composition first, then discuss the composition again and try the strategy. This article has been tried four times. The first essay writer will try two, three or four games. " This article "refers to a rhythmic article, that is, poetry and fu." This concept has been passed down from the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, and has been officially recognized and used. This is very noteworthy.
In the literary criticism of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, another meaning of "essays" refers to miscellaneous styles that are difficult to be clearly classified outside the formal style and mainstream style. This is also the general meaning of ancient stylistics since then. The word "miscellaneous" means "miscellaneous". This kind of composition classification is like every family always has some small and miscellaneous objects. Although it is not expensive, it has its own uses and cannot be discarded. So these small things are stored in the glove box in case of emergency. As a style name, "Essay" has been recorded in the Book of the Later Han Dynasty. The Biography of Wen Yuan in the Later Han Dynasty talks about Du Du's "Fu, Fu, Xing, Shu, Zan, Seven Words, Women's Commandments and 18 Essays". Su Shun has sixteen essays on Fu, Theory, Cheating, Mourning; Wang Yi also has "Fu, Fu, Books and 21 Essays" and so on. However, the nature of this article is not clearly recorded in the Book of the Later Han Dynasty. The so-called "essays" in the Book of the Later Han Dynasty are compared with the styles of poetry, fu, theory, praise, ode and hanging. From its context, it may refer to the miscellaneous body that is difficult to be clearly classified outside the mainstream style. Of course, although the Book of the Later Han Dynasty recorded the history of the Eastern Han Dynasty, it was written about the Southern Dynasties and the Song Dynasty. It is difficult for us to determine whether the concept of "article" was recorded by Ye Fan according to the documents left over from the Eastern Han Dynasty or summed up by himself.
For the first time, Liu Xie systematically discussed the origin, evolution and stylistic features of essays from the perspective of stylistics. "Wen Xin Diao Long" has "Essays". Fan Wenlan's Note: "The narrative of the paper refers to two rhyming articles, essays and harmony, which rhyme or not, so they are placed in the middle; Below the Historical Records, the pen has no rhyme theory. " In the "style" system, "essays" either rhyme or not, but they still belong to "rhyming prose" on the whole. At the beginning of the article, it said: "The son of ingenuity, the man of liberal arts, has substance in his words, and his words are full of gas." This garden is full of love, so it is new and special. "He took Song Yu's Duiwen, Mei Cheng's Qi style and Yang Xiong's Julian as examples, which not only spoke highly of their talent, momentum and literary talent, but also thought that" these three are branches of articles, which they did in their spare time. "Zhipai" is the final production of a genre outside the mainstream style "refers to the production of unimportant items. He believes that these three styles are all improvisations of literati in their leisure time, and they are the details of the article. Liu Xie's view on prose is complicated. On the one hand, he thinks that essays can show the intellectual knowledge, literary talent, literary talent and writing skills of literati, and also bring new elegance to the literary world. On the other hand, the essay style is considered to be in a non-mainstream position. Liu Xie's "essays" have a wide range of connotations. In addition to parallel prose, seven-style prose and essays, it also contains many styles: "Fu and Han wrote detailed essays with various names: swearing in the canon, taking a cursory look at flowers, manipulating songs, or chanting." Summarize its name and return to the field of prose. "He classified all the small styles, such as classics, letters, oaths, questions, browsing, ellipsis, articles, chapters, songs, exercises, tricks, quotations, rhymes, hymns and so on. These are difficult to be incorporated into other styles and into the category of prose. Therefore, Liu Xie's so-called "essays" mainly refer to the category of miscellaneous styles. Some later scholars followed Liu Xie's concept of "essays", such as He Sanwei's New Engraving of He Lei Rong in the Ming Dynasty, Cong Hua in the Qing Dynasty, Liu's Miscellaneous Notes, etc., and all adopted Liu Xie's concept of "essays", taking essays as the mainstream. However, they are also involved in more and more genres, such as Shangliang Wen, Zhiyu, Slogan, Qingci, Buxu Ci, Shangshou Ci and so on. These small essays, which flourished in later generations, are all included in the essays.
Liu Xie's Essays on Wen Xin Diao Long regards "Duiwen" as one of the main styles of essays, and traces it back to Song Yu: "Song Yu is talented and vulgar, and he started to create" Duiwen "to show his ambition, broadmindedness and realism." Song Yuyou asked the king of Chu. Since then, Dong Fangshuo's Hakka Difficulty, Yang Xiong's All Tides, Ban Gu's Binxi, Cui Yi's Da Zhi, Zhang Heng's Ying Jian, Cui Ai's Ke Ji and so on. It has been extended to form a series of unique works in the history of literature. Liu Xie regarded Song Yu Wen Chu Wang as the earliest representative work of questioning style, probably because its title was Wen. In fact, there have been similar works in the form of dialogue in Songs of the South, such as the dialogue between Qu Yuan and Zhan Yin in Buju and the dialogue between Qu Yuan and the fisherman in Fisherman, which shows that this style has a long history. Wu Ne said: "People who ask the right questions, or people who ask the wrong questions at the moment, or people who find the meaning difficult to understand" (Preface to Articles, People's Literature Publishing House, 1962 edition), and divided the right people into two categories. One is to truly record each other's questions and answers, and the other is to deliberately design and virtual questions and answers between the guest and the host. Liu Xie's essay on Wen Xin Diao Long finally said: "The original essay is well written, showing ambition by making a fuss, winning by Tao when you are down and out, and showing your heart by Tao when you are in love, which is a great foundation." The stylistic features of antithesis are as follows: firstly, the center of argument often revolves around personal problems such as the author's lack of talent, low ambition and unfulfilled ambition; The author expresses his anger and dissatisfaction by repeatedly questioning the difficulty of the defense form, so as to achieve the purpose of self-termination. Therefore, Wu Ne said, "Even works such as Difficult to Answer a Guest, Laughing at Laughter, and Binxi are written in the words * * *". Xu Shizeng once said, asking the right person: "Repetition can really relax anger and be considerate, which is indispensable for Gavin." Secondly, rhetorical questions are characterized by virtuality. Xu Shi once said: "Ask the right person, and the words assumed by the literati are also true." Questioners are often the embodiment of secular positions and viewpoints, and authors express their dignity and sublimity beyond the secular by refuting each other. Most of these questions are imaginary assumptions. For example, Dong Fangshuo's On Mr. You Fei even named the hero "You Fei" directly. This virtuality of dialogue style should be influenced by the genre of ci and fu. For example, Zi Xu, Mr. Wu and Kung Fu are all fictional characters in Sima Xiangru's Zi Xu Fu. The style of dialogue is often extravagant, but it also has the shadow of ci. Therefore, some people put the works of dialogue and questions into words.
Parallel prose is also one of the main styles of prose. Seven-style is a style that follows Mei Cheng's "Seven Hair". "Seven hairs" assumes that the king of Chu is ill, so Wu Ke goes to see him and asks him about the situation. Wu Ke believes that "the disease of the prince can be treated with acupuncture instead of medical stone, which can be said in a quip." He inspired the prince from seven aspects. The first six are the beauty of music, the abundance of food, the prosperity of carriages, the grandeur of palaces, the grandeur of hunting and the joy of observing Taoism, but the prince said, "A servant can't get sick." Finally, Wu Ke recommended the alchemist "On the Interpretation of the World and the Right and Wrong of Everything" to the Prince, but the Prince soon recovered. Qi Fa described seven things in succession in the form of a question and answer between the subject and the object. This kind of structure has been used by later generations, forming the seven bodies in Fu. Seven bodies, with the nature of the body. It is not only an essay, but also has the characteristics of ci and fu. As far as form is concerned, the seven bodies can be summed up as the fusion of "asking for truth". As "Stylistic Analysis" said: "Seven, ask the right alias." However, in China's ancient stylistic taxonomy, it is independent, integrated and unquestionable. This is mainly because after seven hairs, many imitations have formed a series of works with considerable scale and distinctive features.
Julian is a parallel prose with false metaphor and reasoning. Julian has multiple stylistic attributes, so its stylistic attribution is also different. Liu Xie's Wen Xin Diao Long and Zhang Taiyan's On the Balance of National Heritage classify Julian as "essays", while Wu Zengqi classifies Julian as "Ci Fu". Taking it as ci fu focuses on the * * * nature of style; Take it as an essay, focusing on stylistic features. This is a matter of opinion. Julian also has the nature of integrationism. It is not only an essay, but also has the characteristics of ci and fu, and it is also an essay of literary style. Julian is a style that pays attention to logical reasoning to explain things. Julian style does not directly state truth or facts, but uses metaphors and old facts to express it, that is, "false metaphors to achieve their goals", which conforms to the meaning of satirical ancient poems. Formally speaking, Julian's poems are short in length, paying attention to the beauty of antithesis and rhyme, and making beautiful words and sentences. Shen Yue said, "Julian's words and sentences are continuous and invented by each other. If the beads are tied together." In other words, one wonderful metaphor after another is like a scattered pearl, which runs through each other with beautiful language, inventing and explaining things, so it is called "Julian". Julian is a kind of verse, and its basic sentence pattern is "Chen Wen (Gaiwen)" ... is based on ",which reflects the causal relationship between the words before and after. For example, Wu Jun's "Julian": "Gavin Li Yan lives in the body and is jealous of eyebrows; Zhenhua looks at things, but waits to see and guess. It's Benji's pet, not the color without S curve; Yoko is lonely and lacks dazzling talent. " On the stylistic features of Fu Xuan's Preface in the Western Jin Dynasty: "Its stylistic rhetoric is beautiful, and it does not talk about things, but it must be empty metaphor to achieve its purpose, while the sage's subtle understanding is exactly in line with the meaning of ancient poetry." If you want to make it vivid, it is easy to see and pleasing, so it is called Julian. " Julian's unique language style has had an important influence on the maturity of parallel prose and has become one of the means for future students to practice parallel prose creation.
The "essays" in Wen Xin Diao Long embodies the stylistic concept of taking poetry as the main body. During the Tang and Song Dynasties, the study of ancient Chinese prose flourished, ancient writers created some new styles, and the concept of "essays" gradually changed. In the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, Wen Yuan Hua Ying had 29 volumes of essays, which were divided into questions and answers, Sao Style, Emperor Dao, Ming Dow, essays, arguments, giving answers, exhortations, satire, narration, satire, essays, miscellaneous goods, conquests, knowledge and deeds, chronicles and so on 10. Including rhymes and essays, including nearly 300 essays, many of which are new creations of ancient writers in China since the Tang Dynasty. The concept of this paper is not only inherited from the Six Dynasties, but also greatly expanded and changed.
Since the Song Dynasty, "essays" have been called "essays". The Song Wenjian in Lv Zuqian contains "miscellaneous works" with volumes 125 to 127. "Essay" means "essay", but it is far from the meaning of "Essay of Carving Dragons in the Literary Mind". Wen Xin Diao Long Zawen mainly refers to several styles, such as Dui Wen, Qi, and so on, but works of these styles are not accepted in the Zawen category. Collected articles such as Responsibility and Color, Wang Hui's Tell a Friend, Record a Guest Talk, Wang Ling's Old Man's Talk by the Road, and Liu Shu's Private Prosecution are all short stories, or occasional feelings, or satirical words, or jokes, or instant recorded stories. The most important point is that it is difficult for these articles to be clearly classified into a certain style from the title. These "essays" are probably short prose works with strong literariness.
Wu Ne's Essay Discrimination and Xu Shizeng's Style Discrimination in Ming Dynasty inherited Liu Xie's essay classification and related theories, but they had great development and differences. Both books include "essays" and define this style. Wu Ne said: "Who is the miscellaneous author? Compilation of Confucian articles. What is an essay? Or comment on ancient and modern times, or elaborate on politics and religion, and in its name, there is no body. " "Everything with the text is collected with the text, and everything recorded will always be mixed together." Xu Ceng Yun: "Essays written by essayists and poets are also; Named after it, it does not fall into the constitution, so it is called miscellaneous. " This is from the perspective of stylistic taxonomy, that is, essays that are difficult to be classified as the main style are essays. Later, in Chuanbin Zhang's interpretation of literary discourse, he said more clearly: "Essays are essays with no class to return to ... so anyone who takes things as the name and does not fall into the constitution is called an essay." (Continued by Yu Zukun, editor-in-chief, Volume II, Phoenix Publishing House, 20 13 edition) Judging from the essays selected by the two men, Wu Ne chose A Phoenix in the Tang Dynasty, Bai Yuyan by Li Ao and Whipping Jia by Liu Zongyuan. According to the habit of the ancients to establish stylistic names, "Some people think that numbers are based on ancient times, while others name them according to their own needs" (Huang Kan's Notes on Wen Xin Diao Long, the ninth praise, Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2000 edition), these articles are really difficult to be classified as a traditional style in terms of title, content and form, so they can only be treated as essays in the stylistic classification of Selected Works. This is a typical "named after things, without losing your body." As Wu Ne said: "Anyone who has a text does not just accept it with the text; The things recorded in it are always mixed. " Stylistically, these articles are essays that comment on the past, discuss the present, talk about politics and religion, and explain the truth. The essay is "miscellaneous" and rational, which is "righteousness-based and temperament-based" Wu Ne and Xu Shizeng have the same view of essays. They think that the functional characteristics of essays are "commenting on ancient and modern times, or discussing politics and religion in detail", expressing unique views on history and reality, mostly for discussion; In form, it is called "miscellaneous" because it has the same name as the book, but has no certain style, and there is no strict system requirement. These styles are difficult to classify in Selected Works, that is, they are classified as essays. Under this concept of essays, Wu and Xu compare Qiwenhe's Essays. At the same time, Xu Shi also noticed the uniqueness of the style of Shangliang, Zhiyu and Qingci, which made this style obtain independent stylistic qualifications, which are listed in the appendix. This concept is obviously different from that of Liu Xie. If Liu Xie represents the prose concept in the era of parallel prose, then Wu and Xu represent the prose concept and its mainstream position after the rise of ancient prose. The influence of this concept on later generations and even modern times is greater and more significant than Liu Xie's concept of essays. In addition, collections of articles such as Lei, Heng and Zui are all classified as "miscellaneous works", and works named after events are also included. Li Zhaoluo's views on articles in Qing Dynasty are similar to those of Wu and Xu. In the works inspired by love, Li Zhaoluo listed "rhetoric", "seven categories", "Julian", "notes" and "essays", which are relatively pure. However, the articles selected from his Essays are quite different from those of Wu and Xu. For example, Wang Bao's A Covenant, An Nu Wen, Dai Liang's Losing Father, Yuan Shu's A Chicken with Nine Tin Pieces, and Kong's The Story of the North Mountain are mostly jokes for the sake of games.
In the history of modern literature, Lu Xun's essays have a lofty position. It is short and pithy, and has a strong critical attitude towards tradition and reality. As he himself said, "it is to react or fight against harmful things immediately, it is the nerve of induction, and it is the hand and foot of attack and defense" ("Preface to Essays in the Pavilion"), and it is "dagger and javelin" (the crisis of essays assembled in the South Room and the North Room). Lu Xun's essays have a strong modern color, which is essentially different from the general traditional "essays" However, Lu Xun has been deeply influenced by traditional culture for a long time, and it is self-evident that he was influenced and absorbed by the tradition of ancient essays. Lu Xun's essays and China's ancient essays are short and pithy in form, and they "discuss ancient and modern, or discuss politics and religion in detail" in function. This artistic tradition of criticism, satire and humor is closely related. Due to the great achievements of Lu Xun's creation, the style of "essays" has become the mainstream from the edge in the history of modern literature, and stragglers have become the main force, which can be described as a miracle in the history of style.
(Author: Chinese Department of Sun Yat-sen University)