Research on the division of styles in Ci poetry during the mid and late Tang Dynasty

Author: Zhao Junbo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: First, the concept of "fu" is a broad literary category. To broadly claim that there were no "fu" in the Tang Dynasty or that the Tang Dynasty was the golden age of "fu" does not accurately reflect the actual state of various literary forms such as, , , and during the middle and late Tang Dynasty. The author relies on factual analysis rather than personal feelings, so their conclusions naturally avoid being one-sided. Second, the most challenging aspect of period-specific literary research is the historical evaluation of the research subject. Literary phenomena at any given point in time are not isolated; without an overall perspective on literary history, it is impossible to appropriately evaluate phenomena in period-specific literary studies. If conclusions are drawn merely based on the quantitative comparison of the number of writers and works or by analyzing the works of a few famous writers, then the study of literary history would be far too simplistic. The author is deeply cautious about this. This book combines the nature of period-specific and thematic research, and the author therefore chose a method that primarily focuses on genre-based analysis while also incorporating diachronic research, "in order to more closely examine the development of a particular genre." The author believes the feasibility of this method lies in: "From a diachronic perspective, the development of 'fu' had already reached a state where all genres were well-established by the middle and late Tang Dynasty, and the basic characteristics of each genre had largely been fixed." "During the Tang Dynasty, when people wrote 'fu,' they already had a concept of genre differentiation in mind."