Classic Chinese Novels


In sinology, the Classic Chinese Novels are two sets of the four or six best-known traditional Chinese novels. The Four Classic Novels include Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber, and the Six Classic Novels add Rulin waishi and Jin Ping Mei to this list. These are among the world's longest and oldest novels, and they are the most read, studied and adapted works of pre-modern Chinese fiction.

Nomenclature and subgroupings

Several terms have been used to refer to the novels and various subgroupings of them. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber are most commonly grouped as the Four Great Classic Novels. Another term used is Classical Novels. Prior to the composition of Unofficial History of the Scholars and the Dream of the Red Chamber, the earlier four began to be referred to as the Four Great Masterworks.
In chronological order, they are:
EnglishSimplified ChineseTraditional ChinesePinyinAttributed toCentury
Romance of the Three Kingdoms:zh:三国演义三國演義14th
Water Margin:zh:水浒传水滸傳Shuǐhǔ ZhuànShi Nai'an14th
Journey to the West:zh:西游记西遊記Xī Yóu JìWu Cheng'en16th
Dream of the Red Chamber:zh:红楼梦紅樓夢Cao Xueqin18th

Background

Chinese fiction, rooted in narrative classics such as A New Account of the Tales of the World, Soushen Ji, Wenyuan Yinghua, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang, Taiping Guangji and official histories, developed into the novel as early as the Song dynasty. The novel as an extended prose narrative which realistically creates a believable world of its own evolved in China and in Europe from the 14th to 18th centuries, though a little earlier in China. Chinese audiences were more interested in history and were more historically minded. They appreciated relative optimism, moral humanism, and relative emphasis on collective behavior and the welfare of the society.
The rise of a "money economy" and urbanization beginning in the Song era led to a professionalization of entertainment which was further encouraged by the spread of printing, the rise of literacy, and education. In both China and Western Europe, the novel gradually became more autobiographical and serious in exploration of social, moral, and philosophical problems. Chinese fiction of the late Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty was varied, self-conscious, and experimental. In China, however, there was no counterpart to the 19th-century European explosion of novels. The novels of the Ming and early Qing dynasties represented a pinnacle of classic Chinese fiction.
The scholar and literary critic Andrew H. Plaks argues that Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West as well as Jin Ping Mei collectively constituted a technical breakthrough reflecting new cultural values and intellectual concerns. Their educated editors, authors, and commentators used the narrative conventions developed from earlier storytellers, such as the episodic structure, interspersed songs and folk sayings, or speaking directly to the reader, but they fashioned self-consciously ironic narratives whose seeming familiarity camouflaged a Neo-Confucian moral critique of late Ming decadence. Plaks explores the textual history of the novels and how the ironic and satirical devices of these novels paved the way for the great novels of the 18th century.
Plaks further shows these Ming novels share formal characteristics. They are almost all over 100 chapters in length; divided into ten chapter narrative blocks which are broken into two to three chapter episodes; arranged into first and second halves which are symmetrical; and arrange their events in patterns which follow seasons and geography. They manipulated the conventions of popular storytelling in an ironic way in order to go against the surface meanings of the story. Three Kingdoms, he argues, presents a contrast between the ideal, that is, dynastic order, and the reality of political collapse and near anarchy; Water Margin likewise presents heroic stories from the popular tradition in a way that exposes the heroism as brutal and selfish; Journey to the West is an outwardly serious spiritual quest undercut by comic and sometimes bawdy tone. Jin Ping Mei is the clearest and most sophisticated example; the action is sometimes grossly sexual, but in the end emphasizes conventional morality.

Influences

The four novels were highly influential in the development of vernacular works in Chinese literary history. Traditionally, fiction and drama were not held in "high regard" in the Chinese or East Asian literary hierarchy, and they were generally not seen as true "literature" by scholars. Writers in these forms would not have the same level of prestige as poets or scholars of Chinese classics would have had.
All four of the novels were written in a style that is a mixture of vernacular and classical Chinese, with some that are more completely vernacular than the others. For instance, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is known for its mix of classical prose with folklore and popular narratives, while the Dream of the Red Chamber is known for the use of poetry within its mostly vernacular style. These four novels are thought to have popularized, and more importantly "legitimatized" the role of vernacular literature among the literary circles of China.
The term "classic novels", writes Andrew H. Plaks, is a "neologism of twentieth-century scholarship" which seems to have come into common use under the influence of C. T. Hsia's Classic Chinese Novel. Paul Ropp, following Hsia's selection, notes that "an almost universal consensus affirms six works as truly great", including, in addition to those above, Jin Ping Mei by Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng and The Unofficial History of the Scholars by Wu Jingzi.
Because of its explicit descriptions of sex, Jin Ping Mei has been banned for most of its existence. Despite this, many if not most scholars and writers, including Lu Xun, place it among the top Chinese novels.