A salient feature of the Qing Dynasty literary criticism is the increased critical attention to ''yili''(义例),a traditional scholastic discourse on stylistic and generic matters in historiography and literary narrative.The genealogy of this discourse can be traced back to the ''yili'' scholarship on the canonical The Spring and Autumn Annals in early antiquity.In the pre-Qin era,Mencius had already pointed out that The Spring and Autumn Annals, being a classic epitome of historiography,embodies three essential compositional elements: the message ''yi''(义),the literary patterning ''wen''(文),and the recorded events ''shi''(事).In West Jin Dynasty Du Yu's Commentary to Zuozhuan(the chronicle of Zuo), there was subtle and thoughtful comments on stylistics of historical narrative.Historically,so to speak,Chinese men of letters paid great attention to the literary patterning of The Spring and Autumn Annals, thus forming a dynamic discourse about problematics in narrative prose.The Yuan Dynasty witnessed the emergence of elaborated discussions in this tradition.During the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasties,men of letters had became accustomed to measuring the merits of literary composition on the basis of ''li''(例),generic or stylistic literary precedents,saying that ''it is imperative to know the literary pattern before one sets about to write''(为文必当明例).People widely believed that the ''li'' is the norm for composing a literary prose. The Qing discourse on ''yili'' was particularly appealing to the needs of practical literary criticism of the time,especially in terms of generic preference,choice of appellation,and choice of style.Generically,this discourse values narrative types such as biography and epigraph that resemble traditional historiography.Appellatively,this discourse prefers the adoption of contemporary official titles and the present custom.Stylistically,this discourse values the pure and classical masterpieces as paragons. The efflorescence of the Qing stylistic discourse is explicable to the double literary needs of mending the corrupted contemporary styles,and to the development of Chinese narrative criticism itself.As a matter of fact,most of the ever-developing prose genres and styles cannot be formulated on the basis of earlier masterpieces except for the Civil Service Exam essay composition and types of applied literary prose.As a result,the development of this ''yili'' discourse went on to spin around the art of time-honored historiography which had the richest generic and stylistic sedimentations.Nevertheless,this critical dynamism efficaciously enhanced Qing scholars' attentions to the art of narratives,breaking the seemingly predominant critical discursive locus of analyzing lyricism in the long tradition of Chinese literature.