The Development of Prose in the Song Dynasty

The Development of Song Prose

Song prose inherited the ancient literature movement advocated by Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan in the Middle Tang Dynasty. From the point of view of ideological content, Song Dynasty prose is mostly a text of discourse for the purpose of lecturing, a text of political commentary for the purpose of discussing politics, and a text of notebooks for the purpose of recording what one sees and hears. The sermons are highly philosophical, the political essays are highly contemporary, and the notebooks are highly interesting and scholarly. The phases are discussed as follows:

1. The early Northern Song Dynasty, inherited the style of the late Tang and Five Dynasties, mainly parallelism, but also some people make ancient texts. The greatest achievement of this period was the re-emergence of the Guwen movement. Representative writers included Liu Kai, Wang Yucheng, Shi Jie, Fan Zhongyan, and Yin Su. From the point of view of ideological content, the greatest characteristic of these ancient writers was the close combination of speech and politics, with a strong educative nature; from the point of view of art, their greatest characteristic was the promotion of simplicity and naturalness, but their creative practice was not yet satisfactory, and sometimes they did not avoid revealing the problem of rhetoric and bitter words.

2. The middle of the Northern Song Dynasty is the most brilliant period of Song prose, but also the achievements of the ancient literary movement. Ouyang Xiu was actually the leader of this period. From the point of view of ideological content, reason and politics gradually separated, to Cheng Yi as the leader of the rationalists advocate "the text to the moral", reason has become the purpose of the rationalists; Ouyang Xiu as the leader of the ancient writers emphasize the concern for all things, the political speech has become the main content of the ancient writers. From the point of view of artistic practice, the ancient writers not only put into practice the theoretical claims of the early Song dynasty easy and natural, but also developed the artistic flavor of the ancient writings, making it more literary.

3. Early Southern Song prose writing is full of patriotic passion, the literati have to the language of politics, demanding resistance to the northern expedition, criticizing the surrender of the peace, with a high degree of combat, its style of writing is also impassioned, the gas is full of potential, reasoning word smooth.

4. The middle of the Southern Song Dynasty is a relatively developed period of prose writing, especially to advocate the Northern Expedition, discussing the country's political thesis and advocating the bright science, philosophical lectures of the highest achievement. The former to Xin Qiji, Lu You, Yang Wanli, Fan Chengda, Chen Liang as a representative of the latter to Zhu Xi, Lu Jiuyuan Ye Shi and others as a representative. These two major content in the writing of the analysis, cut when informative, more argumentative and logical than the Northern Song prose.

5. The end of the Southern Song Dynasty prose shows a trend of decline, since the middle of the atrophy of the literary style at this time unabated. But in the Southern Song Dynasty at the time of the death of the emergence of Wen Tianxiang, Xie Ao, Deng Mu, Wang Yanwu and a large number of writers, have left a lot of excellent documentary lyrical prose, its content is still to express patriotic feelings, but in the death of the country in the style of the more sad and sorrowful.