SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The thesis seeks to identify and examine the various ideas and preferences that together made up the attitude towards literature on the part of Republican China's foremost essayist, Chou Tso-jen. It starts with his favourite theory that literature can be divided between the kind which is written to 'convey the Way' and the other kind which 'expresses the heart's wishes'. The connotations of both formulae in traditional Chinese literary criticism are studied and matched against Chou's interpretation of them. The reasons for Chou's revival of this old antithesis, and its various ramifications, are then discussed in the light of the current debate on the role of literature. His main positive literary values, such as 'sincerity', 'blandness', 'naturalness', are thereafter examined in turn, each with an eye to discovering how well, if at all, these values were established in the Chinese tradition. A separate chapter is devoted to the essay to discover how far Chou's own chosen form could accommodate the values he held dear. The concluding chapter attempts to relate these specifically literary values to the general trend of his thought. The two appendixes examine the philosophy of the two literary schools in Chinese history for which he showed most sympathy and antipathy respectively.