Abstract

Purpose of this paper is to explore the traditional literary pieces of prose writing in the beauty of everyday feelings and leisure, the paper first to write essays of the late Ming aesthetic significance, that the essays of "small", not only represents a modestly, but also a metaphor for aesthetic value, pointing daily, humble, ordinary, trivial things. Late Ming piece "still small" and "goods is still" essentially literary character "still busy" spirit of the so-called "leisure is feeling" about. Second, this analysis "busy" and "leisure" in Chinese meaning of words and language with meaning, that the leisure or inclination to write as an aesthetic category of Chinese literature, not only the main way of thinking about the feelings of the existence of things, even things the ideal point of existence. Scholars not only to "idlers" itself, and "keep busy" and even "keep careless" has become one of the factors that create beauty, and meaningful. Third, the paper points out prose sketches of everyday life points to an unusual and trivial things, which are implicit in the often vulgar aesthetic implications for the United States. The aim of this paper is to explore the appropriate aesthetic meanings of leisure in Chinese literati's prose writings, both in the historical context of cultural transformations and in the artistic context of literature. The first step is to examine the multiple reasons of love of leisure life in the culture and society of the 16th and 17th Centuries China, at the dawn of modernity, when the Late Ming literati were standing at the crossroad of transformations under various impacts: the collapse of traditional social system and traditional value, the rise of Confucian merchants with great wealth and prosperity, the newly arrived European missionaries with Western technology, philosophy and religion. The second step is to analyse the aesthetic meanings of xian in Chinese literature, where xian, as one important category of beauty , is understood not only as a subjective feeling toward the life-world, or a mental attitude of being-in-the-world, but also as an ideal way of existence for all beings, including humans, nature and art works. The third step is, on the critical level, to point out, in this mode of leisure life, the crisis of indulging too much in material objects to the point of losing one's spiritual ambition. In the meanwhile, to find out the dynamism or creative energy of popular culture embedded in their leisure life which is deeply rooted in people's daily life and the everydayness of their life-world