The text investigates into the historical background of the formation of Guanzhong cultural center and its eastward transition since the Eastern Han Dynasty moved its capital to Luoyang. It further analyzes the complicated causes of the literary flourishing in such places as Runan, Yingchuan, Nanyang and its influences upon the contemporaneous literature development, so as to elucidate various reasons for the great different scholarship and literature between the North and the South in the Eastern Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties. Among them one of the most important causes was that they had inherited different traditions.
Due to the marriage ethic that has been emphasized repeatedly by the rulers in the Han Dynasty and the influence of various annotations on The Book of Poetry done from the perspective of Confucian classics, the marital love and the harmonious sex life give way to friendly ties between the couple and a harmonious family life. The ethical taboos for the married couple and the collective unconsciousness that characterizes the whole age caused the poets during the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties to disregard the husband-wife relationship. During this period of time, the poems concerned with the married couple can be divided into two categories according to different ways of expression. Some poems are the self-expressions by heroes or heroines and others are written by the outsiders. In spite of the different perspectives, the loyalty and unyielding love between couples and boudoir complaints remain the most common themes for these poems, which reflect the influence of both the marriage ethic and male dominating social patterns.
Previous studies have attempted to unveil the mystery of Li Bai from various perspectives. This paper tries to reveal Li Bai’s uniqueness by considering his family roots and his immersion in Qiang culture in his early childhood. The fact that Li Bai uses the word bai v} (white) frequently in his poems and that he often thinks of the legend of Ge You, goat rider, demonstrate that he is deeply influenced by the Qiang people and their culture. The reason why he longed day and night to visit the immortals in the grottos of the mountains in Yue is also related to Qiang culture. Taoism was derived from the funeral customs of the Qiang people, and hence the depictions about Chisongzi who rose up to heaven in purple haze in Li Bai’s poems show how immense the influence of the regional culture of Shu and Qiang culture on Li Bai was. In addition, the music he enjoyed and the dance he performed are also closely associated with those of Qiang people.
Jian bureaucrats as a group played an active role in the cultural and political life of China during the mid-Tang period (CE 766–835). Mid-Tang scholars engaged in literary pursuits formed strong attachments to jian positions and were eager to serve as jian bureaucrats. If experience had taught the mid-Tang jian bureaucrats anything, it was that they had to follow cautious strategies in making arguments or suggestions concerning government affairs. This paper aims to show that these jian bureaucrats tended to incorporate their political agenda for administrative supervision into literary writings. In this sense, the relevance between literary activities having political significance and the political agenda of the mid-Tang literati holding jian positions can be examined.
In the Middle & Late Tang Dynasty, the capricious political situations and worsening struggles among the political groups drove the literati to escape from politics into hutian X鯵)?a kind of landscape architecture built as a miniature of arcadia and an epitome of universe where they lived a carefree retired life without quitting their official positions. Compared with their Middle Tang Dynasty precursors, those Late Tang Dynasty literati felt it more difficult to maintain a balance between official career and reclusive life, and found themselves deep in a dilemma. They described elaborately their imagination or construct of a hutian-like garden in their writings, which shows an important change in the literati ethos that resulted from political marginalization of the whole literati class and the their new aesthetic taste.
Families of literary fame in the Song Dynasty grew out of the economically or politically unprivileged or deprived families. Their ethical training by the family tradition made it a necessity for the literati to put moral integrity and ritual formality prior to everything else. Their education, which held book collecting and erudition in great importance, became resources that contributed a lot to the literary prosperity of the Song Dynasty. Both similarity and variation are found with the family literature of the Song Dynasty. Their similarity is reflected in the inheritance of and identification with the ancestral style of writing by later generations. But variation was also a norm, considering the difference of personal character and life experiences of a writer from those of his ancestors. Variation was also caused within familial literature by a liberal conception of literature and the freedom of writing at the time. In spite of that, the literature of different families had one thing in common—a great reverence for their ancestry and a sense of kinship.
