On Genres of An Insight into the Ancient Essays Originated from Six Classic Books

The work An Insight into the Ancient Essays was a large selection of ancient essays in early Qing Dynasty. It has 1,365 articles selected fromThe Spring and Autumn Annals by ZUO Qiu-ming to those in Song Dynasties. Its preface has pointed out that the genres started from six classic books and they belong to the traditional Chinese literary critics which holds that articles originated from classic works. When examining the genres and content of An Insight into Ancient Essays, we find that we respect such classic works in more terms of their content and functions instead of styles. They take “classic” as means, “understanding of truth ” as the principle, and “application” as final goal. This is of a great help for our deeper understanding of the book and the connotation of “articles originating from classic works”.