"Ji" and "Biography" in Historical Records are biographical prose centered on characters, which reproduce colorful historical pictures by showing the activities of characters. The characters in biographies and biographies come from different classes, from emperors and generals to ordinary people. A hundred schools of thought contend. An educated man has everything, involving more than 4,000 people and hundreds of important people.
Historical Records, as an expanded material, is listed as the first of the "Twenty-four History", which, together with the later Hanshu, Houhanshu and the History of the Three Kingdoms, has had a far-reaching impact on the development of later historiography and literature. His original biographical method of compiling history was passed down by the "official history" of later generations.
Historical Records is also an excellent literary work, which occupies an important position in the history of China literature. It is praised by Lu Xun as "a historian's swan song, and Li Sao has no rhyme", which has high literary value. Liu Xiang and others think that this book is "good in order and reason, argumentative but not flashy, qualitative but not vulgar".
The unique narrative art of Historical Records pays great attention to the deeper exploration of the causal relationship of events, synthesizes various historical books of the previous generation, forms a unified statement, and describes all historical times before the middle of the Western Han Dynasty with twelve biographies and ten tables as the representatives vertically, and eight biographies, thirty biographies and seventy biographies as the representatives horizontally, leading all classes, nationalities, fields and industries, forming a comfortable structure criss-crossing.
In addition, Historical Records also has many unique features in terms of composition, sentence patterns and words, which is unique and unconventional, and produces unique effects with its novelty and variety.
Biography of Xiang Yu is one of the most important and wonderful chapters in Historical Records. The history specifically recorded the magnificent historical situation during the struggle between Chu and Han. Literally, this paper is the earliest masterpiece of narrative art centered on characters in China's prose. The thrilling war picture depicted in this paper and Xiang Yu, a classic tragic hero image, have had a great influence on various literary works in later generations.
The characters are arranged in both name and reality, echoing before and after. Biographies at all levels in Historical Records are arranged in chronological order, but they also take into account the internal relations between biographies and follow the principle of similar items. That is, when the same thing involves several people, it is described in detail in one place, but omitted in another place, and sometimes marked with "words in something", which not only avoids repetition, but also plays a role in highlighting the main character of the characters.
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