"The Sense of Mirror" and the Printing and Circulation of History Books in the Northern Song Dynasty

The printing and circulation of history books in the Northern Song dynasty contributed largely to a strong sense of mirror in the minds of the sovereigns and the subjects.The Song literati promoted an historical ideal that re-enforced the hierarchical order of society.However this did not prevent them from refuting the notion of correspondence between heaven and man. Although their dialectic thinking did not stop the downfall of the Song dynasty,it generated an historical consciousness. By closely studying the newly published history books,the Song literati discovered the so called Guwenshifa(the principle of writing manifested in the canon of prose by the ancients,that is,the prose composed in the pre-Qin period and the Han dynasty) which stresses conciseness,figurativeness and vividness in prose writing.To put it briefly,the intuitive historical consciousness allowed the Song literati to be aware of the fact that the real process of writing is never predetermined by the intention of the author;they realized that this is a process of becoming in which the form of the prose is constantly reshaped by the author's intuitive understanding of the fast changing historical life.This intuitive consciousness gives rise to a series of new mutations in poetry,lyric and prose in the Song dynasty.