From many stone carving documents at that time, we can see the literary genre of Qin Dynasty. These inscriptions mostly use four sentences, with irregular long and short sentences and irregular rhymes. According to Jane Bozan's History of Qin and Han Dynasties, "this ode to the emperor's holiness is the source of Han Fu for later generations".
In recent years, the bamboo slips unearthed from the Qin tomb in Shuihudi have eight rhymes, and the format is the same as that in Xunzi Xiangcheng. Xiangcheng is an ancient folk art form and an important basis for studying the literature of Qin Dynasty.
Literature in the Han Dynasty was more prosperous. The main styles are fu, prose and Yuefu poems. Fu is a style of prose and verse, which records things with things.
The Fu in the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, in simple words, represented Jia Yi's Fu of Diaoqu Yuan and Fu of Pengniao.
During the period of Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty, Fu literature flourished. There are many writers, represented by Zi Xufu and Shang. In Sima Xiangru's Biographies of Historical Records, all of them were recorded as an article, and The Selected Works was originally divided into two parts. Zi Xu Fu boasted about the grand occasion of hunting by the king of Chu and the king of Qi through imaginary messengers Zi Xu and Mr. Qi Guowu. Shanglin Fu attempts to spread the magnificent hunting style of the son of heaven in Shanglin Garden through the assumption that the dead are for the public, and greatly collapses the hunting scenes of Chu and Qi, so as to show that the son of heaven will overwhelm the princes.
Prose is getting higher and higher, layer by layer, nearly 8000 words, magnificent, rich in vocabulary, fully demonstrating the descriptive ability. For example, the description of the music and dance festival held after the hunting of the son of heaven in Shanglinyuan is very touching.
At the end of the Western Han Dynasty, Yang Xiong was the most famous fu writer, and his masterpiece was Ganquan Fu.
During the Eastern Han Dynasty, Ban Gu and Zhang Heng were the most famous, and their representative works were Fu of Two Jing and Fu of Two Jing respectively. Sima Xiangru, Yang Xiong, Ban Gu and Zhang Heng are known as the four masters of Han Fu.
At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the big fu depicting the prosperous scene of the upper class declined slightly, and it was replaced by small fu of various lyrical things, with fresh artistic conception. Among them, Zhao Yi's On Stabbing the World and Illness Fu reveals the corruption of the rule and social atmosphere in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, which is unique in Han Fu.
Some works of Han Fu, which mainly describe safari and Kyoto, have some shortcomings, such as over-laying, rigid form, piling up words and imitation, but there are a large number of writers and works, and there are still more than 1000 works that have been handed down to this day. Han Fu pays great attention to structure, words and rhyme, which has a certain influence on later literature. Therefore, Wang Guowei, a modern scholar, once regarded Fu as the representative of literary creation in Han Dynasty, which was juxtaposed with Tang poetry, Song ci and Yuan qu.
The prose of the Han dynasty has also made great achievements. In the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, Jia Yi's Poems on Chen Zheng (also known as Public Security Policy), Guo Qin's Lun Gui Su Shu and Chao Cuo's Lun Gui Su Shu have always been regarded as models of political papers by later generations, occupying an important position in the history of literature.
Historical Records has made outstanding contributions to the creation of China's biographical literature. It is the highest achievement of prose in Han Dynasty and a treasure in Universal Library.
Yuefu folk songs in Han Dynasty are also a valuable heritage in China's literary treasure house. Yuefu is an institution in charge of court music, which was first established in the Qin Dynasty.
During the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, Yuefu began to "collect poems and recite them at night to show the support of Qin Chu" in order to entertain the imperial court and offer sacrifices to temples. Folk songs collected by Yuefu were later called Yuefu poems or Yuefu after being processed and composed. These folk songs "all feel sad and happy, all because of something", which widely and profoundly reflected the social life at that time.
Peacock Flying Southeast, a long narrative poem in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, is the highest peak of Yuefu folk songs in the Han Dynasty and an immortal masterpiece in the history of China's poetry.
In the Eastern Han Dynasty, there also appeared five-character poems created by literati imitating Yuefu. Nineteen Ancient Poems was written by a group of unknown poets, and its masterpiece is a collection of poems. I am used to using the first sentence as the title, such as "walking and walking again", "grass by the green river" and "there are tall buildings in the northwest" are all beautiful lyrics. Han Yuefu not only nurtured the poems of contemporary literati, but also had a great influence on poets in Wei, Jin and even Tang Dynasty.