Seeking truth : Wang Guowei in Chinese literary criticism = 求真 : 王國維與傳統文學批評

Abstract

Wang Guowei was an important scholar who had great achievements in many aspects such as paleography, ancient culture and literary criticism. “Ren Jian Ci Hua” (人間詞話)was one of his significant literary criticism works that he applied western critical and logical methods in traditional literary criticism. He proposed a key criticism term “state”(境界) which was one of the most popular research subjects that many people tried to find out the meaning and originate of it. As many works have been done, this paper summarizes and analyses the previous studies about Wang’s literary criticism theory and defines what is “state”. The core of “state” theory is “seeking truth” which is an important key to understand Wang’s literary theory and his academic thoughts. Secondly, Wang Guowei had many articles which were about his thoughts of literary criticism and philosophy. Those articles can provide a lot of information to clarify the content about how he thought about the truth of literature or the truth of life. Thirdly, Wang’s theory was complex and many people think that he was affected by the western philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant. Although he spent lots of time in studying those theories, Wang Guowei was mainly affected by Chinese literary theories but not the western theories. This paper argues that Chinese philosophy and literary theory are the most important components in Wang’s literary criticism theory.