| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 國文學系 === 102 === The literary works written around the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic have described and discussed a lot about the life of Yi Shun-Ding. Among the discussions, the polarization on his poetic achievement was extremely huge, so was its influence on the latter study of Yi and his works. Until now, the discourse on Yi is still under the framework set at that time. This research, with a thematic approach to introduce Yi’s life and literary works, aims to review Yi from a new perspective.
The research begins with Yi’s difficult childhood under the reign of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. His observations on the wartime disturbance constitute his self-awareness and get people start recognizing his talent in literature. In his adulthood, he inevitably had to deal with the struggle of whether to take a political position. Choosing between sustaining his family and pursuing his literary career constantly troubled him. Later, the sorrow due to the death of his beloved family drove him to the religious study on the spirit medium, which in a way shows his nature. The research examines the several important stages of his life, from participating in the Imperial Examination, to entering the private secretariat system, to ultimately becoming a member of the bureaucracy. It analyzes his motivations behind each choice, accounts for his detaching attitude toward politics at the end of the Qing Dynasty and how he re-established his nation identity after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. With the walkthrough of Yi’s life, the research could go beyond the character and ethical debate that most researchers did on him, and truly reveal how the traditional intellectuals made choices about their career and life in the disturbing era between the Qing Dynasty and the Republic.
Yi’s political activities drew little attention from the critics while his accomplishment on poetry, particularly the establishment of the late Tang Dynasty’s poetic fashion, made him a very prominent poet from the late Qing Dynasty to the early Republic. His landscape poems especially had the dominant position at that time. This research emphasizes on his life and poetic works, discusses the formation of his poetic literacy, the development of his techniques and his shifting in poetic styles, and also analyzes his unique allusions in the landscape poems, the realistic poems and the poems that praise the famous actors or actresses. Yi’s interactions with his friends, and even the Taiwanese poets, demonstrate the solidarity of poetry. Poetry is his way of meditating upon his life, the constantly changing world and the challenges lying behind. It reveals his romantic conception of the world.
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