Bureaucrat and Local Elite: The Double Prospect of the Houcun Ci

In the process of the transformation from classical literature to secular literature in the middle and later period of the Southern Song Dynasty, Liu Kezhuang has attracted much attention because of multiple identities. In the past, he was regarded as a member of Xin School, but his Ci mostly expressed the “hero's lost ambition”, and had the characteristics of running local interpersonal networks and game articles. However, the literary tradition still restricts the literati's creative inertia. The frequent use of allusions, Neo Confucianism discourses and their inner emotional barrenness form a higher level of contradiction, which has inherent time commonality with Mengchuang Ci. The conflicts of multiple perspectives in Ci showed the struggle of the Literati Spirit, echoing the secularization of literature in the late Southern Song Dynasty.