Wen and the construction of a critical system in Wenxin diaolong

In undertaking a comprehensive study of wen in the Literary Mind, I shall integrate philological and theoretical approaches. Drawing from philological investigations of others as well as my own, I shall demonstrate how Liu Xie exploits the multivalence of wen to construct five pairs of important relationships: wen and the Dao, wen and sheng聖(sages), wen and yan言(speech) and shu書(writing), wen and li理(principle), and wen and qing情(emotion). As I discuss Liu’s exploration of these five wen-centered relationships, I will show that Liu’s uses of wen are of much greater theoretical significance than commonly thought.