Abstract: There are many incisive and indirect ideas about the literature of the Western and Eastern Jin dynasties in Liu Xie’s book Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. In fact, these ideas can be regarded as a special theory of literature in the Western and Eastern Jin Dynasties. This article summarizes the literature characteristics of Western Jin Dynasty in terms of rhetoric and phonology, as well as its styles of Fan, Mi and Guang Bo in Chinese. Liu Xie’s basic view of literature in Western Jin Dynast is that the skills of rhetoric, phonology, etc. were very prominent. Liu Xie held that the literature of Eastern Jin Dynasty was influenced by Metaphysics and was generally not as good as the Western literature. This theory embodies the following ideology of Liu Xie: the tendency of Confucianism, advocating archaism but not restoring ancient ways, advocating simple and fresh literary thought.

Key words: Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Eastern Jin and Western Jin Dynasties, literary theory, literary thought