1. Ancient prose: In ancient China, in order to distinguish it from rhymes and parallel prose, all prose articles, including classics, biographies and history books, were called prose.
The development of China's ancient prose;
(1) Pre-Qin Prose: Including the Prose of Various Scholars and Historical Prose. Hundred schools of thought's essays are mainly expositions, such as The Analects of Confucius, Mencius and Zhuangzi. Historical prose mainly focuses on historical themes, and all articles and books describing historical events and historical figures are historical prose, such as Zuo Zhuan.
(2) Prose in the Han Dynasty: Sima Qian's Historical Records in the Western Han Dynasty pushed biographical prose to an unprecedented peak. After the Eastern Han Dynasty, individual prose forms such as books, notes, inscriptions, essays and prefaces began to appear.
Prose in Tang and Song Dynasties: Under the impetus of the ancient prose movement, prose writing became increasingly complex, and literary prose appeared, resulting in many excellent works such as landscape travel notes, fables, biographies and essays. And the famous "Eight Masters of Tang and Song Dynasties" also emerged at this time.
(3) Prose in the Ming Dynasty: First, there were "Seven Scholars", mainly imitating ancient times. Later, in the Tang and Song Dynasties, all works were advocated to flow from the chest, the most famous of which was Gui Youguang.
Qing dynasty prose: represented by Tongcheng school, Qing dynasty prose pays attention to the embodiment of "righteousness" Yao Nai, a representative writer of Tongcheng School, summed up the style of ancient Chinese prose and classified it into 13 categories, including argumentative essays, prefaces and postscripts, recitation, calligraphy, preface, imperial edict, biography, epitaph, miscellaneous words, ode, ci fu and mourning.