Most modern scholars regard the style of ZHUANG ZI as romantic, but this is actually not all true. According to the basic features of realisticstyle literature, ZHUANG ZI is found to contain large quantities of romantic writings as is commonly believed and also considerable numbers of excellent realistic literary works. Characteristic of criticalrealism, these works are abundant in ideological content and are artistically characterized by novel means of realistic description and irony. As a great frontierman of Chinese realist literature, ZHUANG ZI exercised enormous influence on the growth of realist literature in later days.

ZHUANG ZI; realist literature; means of realistic description; irony