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104-454: These works are among the world's longest and oldest novels. They represented a new complexity in structure and sophistication in language that helped to establish the novel as a respected form among later popular audiences and erudite critics. The Chinese historian and literary theorist C. T. Hsia wrote in 1968 that these six works "remain the most beloved novels among the Chinese." During

208-458: A meritocratic ruling class, with the best students running the country. The imperial examinations gave many people the opportunity to pursue political power and honor and thus encouraged serious pursuit of formal education. Since the system did not formally discriminate based on social status, it provided an avenue for upward social mobility. However, even though the examination-based bureaucracy's heavy emphasis on Confucian literature ensured that

312-461: A Mockingbird . Murasaki Shikibu 's Tale of Genji , an early 11th-century Japanese text, has sometimes been described as the world's first novel, because of its early use of the experience of intimacy in a narrative form. There is considerable debate over this, however, as there were certainly long fictional prose works that preceded it. The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of

416-630: A climate of "studying well so as to become an official" 学而优则仕. In 1905, the Qing government abolished the imperial examination system, leading to the gradual disappearance of scholar-officials. Since only a select few could become court or local officials, the majority of the scholar-literati stayed in villages or cities as social leaders. The scholar-gentry carried out social welfare measures, taught in private schools, helped negotiate minor legal disputes, supervised community projects, maintained local law and order, conducted Confucian ceremonies, assisted in

520-411: A form of entertainment. However, one of the earliest English novels, Daniel Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe (1719), has elements of the romance, unlike these novels, because of its exotic setting and story of survival in isolation. Crusoe lacks almost all of the elements found in these new novels: wit, a fast narration evolving around a group of young fashionable urban heroes, along with their intrigues,

624-464: A hero and his life. The adventures led to satirical encounters with the real world with the hero either becoming the pitiable victim or the rogue who exploited the vices of those he met. A second tradition of satirical romances can be traced back to Heinrich Wittenwiler 's Ring ( c.  1410 ) and to François Rabelais ' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), which parodied and satirized heroic romances, and did this mostly by dragging them into

728-590: A new legitimacy. These novels were written in a mixture of vernacular and classical Chinese, though some were more completely vernacular. 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 novels popularized and legitimatized

832-573: A nostalgia for the old romances with their heroism and professed virtue. Jane Barker explicitly advertised her Exilius as "A new Romance", "written after the Manner of Telemachus", in 1715. Robinson Crusoe spoke of his own story as a "romance", though in the preface to the third volume, published in 1720, Defoe attacks all who said "that [...] the Story is feign'd, that the Names are borrow'd, and that it

936-457: A novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also novels, including Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein , J. R. R. Tolkien 's The Lord of the Rings , and Harper Lee 's To Kill

1040-449: A philosophical and a theological novel, respectively. The tradition of works of fiction that were also philosophical texts continued with Thomas More 's Utopia (1516) and Tommaso Campanella 's City of the Sun (1602). However, the actual tradition of the philosophical novel came into being in the 1740s with new editions of More's work under the title Utopia: or the happy republic;

1144-639: A philosophical romance (1743). Voltaire wrote in this genre in Micromegas: a comic romance, which is a biting satire on philosophy, ignorance, and the self-conceit of mankind (1752, English 1753). His Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759) became central texts of the French Enlightenment and of the modern novel. An example of the experimental novel is Laurence Sterne 's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), with its rejection of continuous narration. In it

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1248-406: A point in a conversation, and the exemplum a priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of examples designed for the use of clerics to compilations of various stories such as Boccaccio 's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales (1386–1400). The Decameron

1352-568: A pseudo- bucolic form, and the celebrated L'Astrée , (1610) of Honore d'Urfe (1568–1625), which is the earliest French novel, is properly styled a pastoral . Although its action was, in the main, languid and sentimental, there was a side of the Astree which encouraged that extravagant love of glory, that spirit of " panache", which was now rising to its height in France. That spirit it was which animated Marin le Roy de Gomberville (1603–1674), who

1456-465: A rising literacy rate among the growing population of townspeople, as well as the development of lending libraries. Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) might be said to have given birth to the modern consciousness of the novel in Japan, mixing vernacular dialogue into his humorous and cautionary tales of the pleasure quarters, the so-called Ukiyozōshi (" floating world ") genre. Ihara 's Life of an Amorous Man

1560-517: A scandalous moral, gallant talk to be imitated, and a brief, concise plot. The new developments did, however, lead to Eliza Haywood 's epic length novel, Love in Excess (1719/20) and to Samuel Richardson 's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741). Some literary historians date the beginning of the English novel with Richardson's Pamela , rather than Crusoe. The idea of the "rise of the novel" in

1664-489: A separate key. The Mercure Gallant set the fashion in the 1670s. Collections of letters and memoirs appeared, and were filled with the intriguing new subject matter and the epistolary novel grew from this and led to the first full blown example of scandalous fiction in Aphra Behn 's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684/ 1685/ 1687). Before the rise of the literary novel, reading novels had only been

1768-672: A single sheet folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages. They were often illustrated with crude woodcuts , which sometimes bore no relation to the text. When illustrations were included in chapbooks, they were considered popular prints . The tradition arose in the 16th century, as soon as printed books became affordable, and rose to its height during the 17th and 18th centuries. Many different kinds of ephemera and popular or folk literature were published as chapbooks, such as almanacs , children's literature , folk tales , nursery rhymes , pamphlets , poetry , and political and religious tracts . The term "chapbook" for this type of literature

1872-470: A thousand Chinese titles were imported every year. Their prominence prove to be crucial in the development of literature in these places. Novel A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book . The English word to describe such a work derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story (of something new)", itself from

1976-503: Is Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen , published in 1668, Late 17th-century critics looked back on the history of prose fiction, proud of the generic shift that had taken place, leading towards the modern novel/novella. The first perfect works in French were those of Scarron and Madame de La Fayette 's "Spanish history" Zayde (1670). The development finally led to her Princesse de Clèves (1678),

2080-706: Is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love . Originally, romance literature was written in Old French , Anglo-Norman and Occitan , later, in English , Italian and German . During the early 13th century, romances were increasingly written as prose. The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century; for example, the Romance of Flamenca . The Prose Lancelot or Vulgate Cycle also includes passages from that period. This collection indirectly led to Thomas Malory 's Le Morte d'Arthur of

2184-473: Is a type of narrative in prose or verse popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe . They were marvel-filled adventures , often of a knight-errant with heroic qualities, who undertakes a quest , yet it is "the emphasis on heterosexual love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the chanson de geste and other kinds of epic , which involve heroism." In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there

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2288-548: Is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place". The late 18th century brought an answer with the Romantic Movement's readiness to reclaim the word romance, with the gothic romance , and the historical novels of Walter Scott . Robinson Crusoe now became a "novel" in this period, that is a work of the new realistic fiction created in the 18th century. Sentimental novels relied on emotional responses, and feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and

2392-444: Is another important institutional basis of the formation and prosperity of scholar-officials. The order of these Four Occupations were scholar-officials, farmers, artisans, and craftsmen/merchants. Confucianism is the core of traditional Chinese culture and the theoretical basis of the autocratic feudal monarchy. The Confucian school of thought became the mainstream of traditional Chinese society, and Confucian education also became

2496-582: Is considered by some to be one of the earliest "romances" or "novels" of China, and it was influential on later works of fiction in East Asia. Urbanization and the spread of printed books in Song dynasty (960–1279) led China to the evolution of oral storytelling, chuanqi and huaben , into long-form multi-volume vernacular fictional novels by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The European developments of

2600-469: Is considered the first work in this genre. Although Ihara's works were not regarded as high literature at the time because it had been aimed towards and popularized by the chōnin (merchant classes), they became popular and were key to the development and spread of ukiyozōshi . A chapbook is an early type of popular literature printed in early modern Europe . Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered booklets, usually printed on

2704-404: Is the clearest and most sophisticated example: the action is sometimes grossly sexual, but in the end emphasizes conventional morality. These novels influenced the development of vernacular fiction in later Chinese literary history . Traditionally, fiction and drama were not held in high regard in the Chinese and East Asian literary culture, and they were generally not seen as true "literature" by

2808-624: Is the first to show strong signs of a single author who composed all or most of the text, which became more common in later novels. In the late Ming and early Qing, new commercial publishing houses found it profitable to issue novels that claimed specific authors and authentic texts. They commissioned scholars to edit texts and supply commentaries to interpret them. Mao Zonggang , for instance, and his father Mao Lun, edited Three Kingdoms and Jin Shengtan edited Water Margin , supplying an introduction to which he signed Shi Nai'an's name. In each case

2912-483: The Roman à clef . Other works could, conversely, claim to be factual histories, yet earn the suspicion that they were wholly invented. A further differentiation was made between private and public history: Daniel Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe was, within this pattern, neither a "romance" nor a "novel". It smelled of romance, yet the preface stated that it should most certainly be read as a true private history. The rise of

3016-560: The Han dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912, China 's last imperial dynasty. After the Sui dynasty these officials mostly came from the scholar-gentry (紳士 shēnshì ) who had earned academic degrees (such as xiucai , juren , or jinshi ) by passing the imperial examinations . Scholar-officials were the elite class of imperial China. They were highly educated, especially in literature and

3120-479: The Lu clan of Fanyang . These clans were prominent in having Confucian scholars and high-ranking government officials, with male family members serving as official for generations and some clans or families serving several chancellors. They formed a huge network through political marriages with each other or the imperial family and also formed a monopoly on education and government officials. Officially established in 587,

3224-538: The Neo-Confucian school , further enriching the Confucian ideological system. This directly increased the prosperity of the scholar-official class and also contributed to the unique moral code of the scholar-officials, which had a huge impact on the Chinese literati of later generations. The traditional Chinese official selection systems are the institutional basis of the formation of scholar-officials. Using

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3328-531: The Yuan , Ming and Qing dynasties, the stereotyped writing style of the eight-legged essay (八股文) format dominated the Imperial Examination, and scholar-officials from this period were relatively unable to speak and create freely due to the harsh political environment. The strong relationship between Imperial Examination and the official position were still present, though the entire society formed

3432-508: The literati who dominated intellectual life. Writers in these forms did not have the same level of prestige as poets or scholars of Chinese classics . The late Ming and early Qing dynasty versions of these novels, however, included commentaries that were printed between the lines, so that the reader saw them as part of the text. These commentaries interpreted the text in often strained ways, but established critical and aesthetic criteria, modeled on those of poetry and painting, that gave fiction

3536-425: The "belongs to the commoners", "trivial daily talks" aspect in one of his work. The earliest novels include classical Greek and Latin prose narratives from the first century BC to the second century AD, such as Chariton 's Callirhoe (mid 1st century), which is "arguably the earliest surviving Western novel", as well as Petronius ' Satyricon , Lucian 's True Story , Apuleius ' The Golden Ass , and

3640-474: 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 under the Song dynasty led to a professionalization of entertainment which was further encouraged by

3744-449: The 1610 text, however, was a more coherent and presumably closer to the author's intent. In chronological order of their earliest forms, they are: From early times, Chinese writers preferred history as the genre for telling stories about people, while poetry was preferred for personal expression of emotion. Confucian literati , who dominated cultural life, looked down on other forms as xiao shuo (lit. “little talk” or “minor writings”),

3848-410: The 16th and 17th centuries two factors led to the separation of history and fiction. The invention of printing immediately created a new market of comparatively cheap entertainment and knowledge in the form of chapbooks . The more elegant production of this genre by 17th- and 18th-century authors were belles lettres — that is, a market that would be neither low nor academic. The second major development

3952-453: The 18th century is especially associated with Ian Watt 's influential study The Rise of the Novel (1957). In Watt's conception, a rise in fictional realism during the 18th century came to distinguish the novel from earlier prose narratives. The rising status of the novel in eighteenth century can be seen in the development of philosophical and experimental novels . Philosophical fiction

4056-444: The 19th century, they have only become popular recently. A novel is a long, fictional narrative. The novel in the modern era usually makes use of a literary prose style . The development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in printing , and the introduction of cheap paper in the 15th century. Several characteristics of a novel might include: East Asian countries, like China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan, use

4160-457: The 19th-century femmes fatales . Scholar-official The scholar-officials , also known as literati , scholar-gentlemen or scholar-bureaucrats ( Chinese : 士大夫 ; pinyin : shì dàfū ), were government officials and prestigious scholars in Chinese society, forming a distinct social class. Scholar-officials were politicians and government officials appointed by the emperor of China to perform day-to-day political duties from

4264-447: The 5th through 8th centuries. Vasavadatta by Subandhu , Daśakumāracarita and Avantisundarīkathā by Daṇḍin , and Kadambari by Banabhatta are among notable works. These narrative forms were influenced by much older classical Sanskrit plays and Indian classical drama literature, as well as by oral traditions and religious texts. The 7th-century Tang dynasty narrative prose work You Xian Ku written by Zhang Zhuo

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4368-662: The Civil Service Examination allowed for selection of scholar-officials. Beginning with the Sui dynasty , those with the right family background who passed this examination would become scholar-officials. In the early part of the Tang dynasty , empress Wu Zetian reformed and improved the Imperial Examination system by establishing the Metropolitan Exam ; people who passed it were called Jinshi (metropolitan graduates, highest degree), and people passed

4472-516: The Fatalist (1773, printed posthumously in 1796). A market of literature in the modern sense of the word, that is a separate market for fiction and poetry, did not exist until the late seventeenth century. All books were sold under the rubric of "History and politicks" in the early 18th century, including pamphlets , memoirs , travel literature , political analysis, serious histories, romances, poetry, and novels. That fictional histories shared

4576-604: The Golden Vase until 1957 and in 1985). Since the early 1980s, they have been known in mainland China as the Four Great Classical Novels . None of the six were published in the author's lifetime. Three Kingdoms and Water Margin appeared in many variants and forms long before being edited in their classic form in the late Ming. There is considerable debate on their authorship. Since the novel, unlike poetry or painting, had little prestige, authorship

4680-571: The Golden Vase was banned for most of its existence. Despite this, Lu Xun , like many if not most scholars and writers, place it among the top Chinese novels. After the Communist takeover in China, the official People's Literature Publishing House successively republished the collated editions of Water Margin , Romance of the Three Kingdoms , Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West between 1952 and 1954 (It would not republish The Plum in

4784-592: The Latin: novella , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus , diminutive of novus , meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody , the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel , Medieval Chivalric romance , and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella . The ancient romance form

4888-624: The Ming and Qing dynasties represented a pinnacle of classic Chinese fiction. Until World War II, the dominant sinological scholarship considered all fiction popular and therefore directly reflective of the creative imagination of the masses. C. T. Hsia, however, established the role of the scholar-literati in the creation of vernacular fiction, though not denying the popular subject matter of some texts. Scholars then examined traditional fiction for sophisticated techniques. The American literary critic and sinologist Andrew H. Plaks argues that Romance of

4992-689: The Ming and Qing dynasties, Chinese novels inspired sequels, rebuttals, and reinventions with new settings, sometimes in different genres. Far more than in the European tradition, every level of society was familiar with the plots, characters, key incidents, and quotations. Those who could not read these novels for themselves knew them through tea-house story-tellers, Chinese opera , card games, and new year pictures . In modern times they live on through popular literature, graphic novels, cartoons and films, television drama, video games, and theme parks. The literary critic and sinologist Andrew H. Plaks writes that

5096-600: The Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes", which focuses on a potential victim, a heroine that has all the modern virtues and who is vulnerable because her low social status and her occupation as servant of a libertine who falls in love with her. She, however, ends in reforming her antagonist. Male heroes adopted the new sentimental character traits in the 1760s. Laurence Sterne 's Yorick ,

5200-514: The Provincial Exam were called Juren (provincial graduates). Wu's reforms gradually led to today's concept of scholar-officials and the intellectual class. The government would select scholar-officials by examining their poems and essays writings for knowledge of Confucian texts and some Buddhist texts. Intellectuals who passed the exam served as officials. Many famous Tang poets were scholar-officials, such as Du Mu . However, because

5304-639: The Recommendatory System and Nine-rank System to select governments officials and candidates were popular during the long period beginning with the Han dynasty and ending after the Northern and Southern dynasties period. Scholars-officials during this period usually from prominent clans, including the Zheng clan of Xingyang , Xie clan of Chen Commandery , Cui clan of Qinghe , Cui clan of Boling , Wang clan of Langya , Wang clan of Taiyuan , and

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5408-525: The Shi class provided valuable services to their lords. Shi became more influential and Da Fu gradually evolved into an official position in the bureaucracy, not a hereditary peerage. The Shi and Da Fu gradually merged and became the Scholar-officials (士大夫 Shi Da Fu). The feudal social structure came to divide ordinary people into four categories, with scholar-officials at its top level, this structure

5512-677: The Tang Dynasty was a rapidly changing period for the final formation of the structure and composition of scholar-officials, there is some ambiguity of the usage of the words "scholar-officials": according to the Old Book of Tang , scholars/intellectuals who passed the imperial exam but took no official position could only be referred to Shi 士; according to the New Book of Tang , as long as they were scholars, whether official or not, they could be called scholar-officials. The Song dynasty

5616-500: The Three Kingdoms , Water Margin , Journey to the West as well as Jin Ping Mei (not considered one of the four classic novels but discussed by him as one of the four masterworks of the Ming dynasty) 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

5720-620: The ancient definition of "small talks" merely refers to trivial affairs, trivial facts, and can be different from the Western concept of novel. According to Lu Xun , the word "small talks" first appeared in the works of Zhuang Zhou , which coined such word. Later scholars also provided a similar definition, such as Han dynasty historian Ban Gu , who categorized all the trivial stories and gossips collected by local government magistrates as "small talks". Hồ Nguyên Trừng classified his memoir collection Nam Ông mộng lục as "small talks" clearly with

5824-547: The anonymous Aesop Romance and Alexander Romance . These works were often influenced by oral traditions, such as storytelling and myth-making, and reflected the cultural, social, and political contexts of their time. Afterwards, their style was adapted in later Byzantine novels such as Hysimine and Hysimines by Eustathios Makrembolites Narrative forms were also developed in Classical Sanskrit in India during

5928-577: The arts, including calligraphy and Confucian texts. They dominated the government administration and local life of China until the early 20th century. Scholar-official as a concept and social class first appeared during the Warring States period ; before that, the Shi and Da Fu were two different classes. During the Western Zhou dynasty, the Duke of Zhou divided the social classes into

6032-561: The author not only addresses readers in his preface but speaks directly to them in his fictional narrative. In addition to Sterne's narrative experiments, there are visual experiments, such as a marbled page, a black page to express sorrow, and a page of lines to show the plot lines of the book. The novel as a whole focuses on the problems of language, with constant regard to John Locke 's theories in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . The rise of

6136-462: The cities as traders. Cheap printed histories were, in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially popular among apprentices and younger urban readers of both sexes. The early modern market, from the 1530s and 1540s, divided into low chapbooks and high market expensive, fashionable, elegant belles lettres . The Amadis and Rabelais ' Gargantua and Pantagruel were important publications with respect to this divide. Both books specifically addressed

6240-707: The concept of novel as it is understood in the Western world was (and still is) termed as "long length small talk" (長篇小說), novella as "medium length small talk" (中篇小說), and short stories as "short length small talk" (短篇小說). However, in Vietnamese culture, the term 小說 exclusively refers to 長篇小說 (long-length small talk), i.e. standard novel, while different terms are used to refer to novella and short stories. Such terms originated from ancient Chinese classification of literature works into "small talks" (tales of daily life and trivial matters) and "great talks" ("sacred" classic works of great thinkers like Confucius ). In other words,

6344-559: The early 1470s. Prose became increasingly attractive because it enabled writers to associate popular stories with serious histories traditionally composed in prose, and could also be more easily translated. Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic , satiric or burlesque intent. Romances reworked legends , fairy tales , and history, but by about 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in Don Quixote (1605). Still,

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6448-449: The editor made cuts, additions, and basic alterations to the text, misrepresenting them as restoring the original. They also supplied commentaries with literary and political points that modern scholars sometimes find strained. Their editions, however, became standard for centuries, and most modern translations are based on them. Zhang Zhupo likewise edited The Plum in the Golden Vase . Zhang worked on an abridged and rewritten text of 1695;

6552-420: 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 (all published after their author's deaths, usually anonymously) and how the ironic and satirical devices of these novels paved

6656-475: The first novel with what would become characteristic French subject matter. Europe witnessed the generic shift in the titles of works in French published in Holland, which supplied the international market and English publishers exploited the novel/romance controversy in the 1670s and 1680s. Contemporary critics listed the advantages of the new genre: brevity, a lack of ambition to produce epic poetry in prose;

6760-556: The first significant European novelist of the modern era . Literary historian Ian Watt , in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century. Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes audio books , web novels , and ebooks . Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in graphic novels . While these comic book versions of works of fiction have their origins in

6864-418: The government's collection of taxes, and preached Confucian moral teachings. As a class, these scholars claimed to represent morality and virtue. The district magistrate , who by regulation was not allowed to serve in his home district, depended on the local gentry for advice and for carrying out projects, which gave them the power to benefit themselves and their clients. Theoretically, this system would create

6968-584: The hero of the Sentimental Journey (1768) did so with an enormous amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith 's Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Henry Mackenzie 's Man of Feeling (1771) produced the far more serious role models. These works inspired a sub - and counterculture of pornographic novels, for which Greek and Latin authors in translations had provided elegant models from the last century. Pornography includes John Cleland 's Fanny Hill (1748), which offered an almost exact reversal of

7072-556: The heroes, it was always hinted that they were well-known public characters of the day in a romantic disguise. Stories of witty cheats were an integral part of the European novella with its tradition of fabliaux . Significant examples include Till Eulenspiegel (1510), Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Grimmelshausen 's Simplicissimus Teutsch (1666–1668) and in England Richard Head 's The English Rogue (1665). The tradition that developed with these titles focused on

7176-419: The influence of the founding emperor of Song Zhao Kuangyin , almost all Song emperors showed great respect to intellectuals. If a scholar-official from the Song dynasty committed a crime, he couldn't be held accountable directly. Instead, an internal impeachment replaced the formal judicial process. If his crime wasn't serious, he only needed to be punished with a reprimand instead of a criminal penalty. During

7280-478: The king, feudal lords, Da Fu, Shi, ordinary people, and slaves. Da Fu were people from the aristocracy who served as officers and were a higher class than Shi, who were people from the social class between Da Fu and ordinary people and could only serve as low-level officials. During the Warring States period, with the annexation wars between states and the rise of bureaucracy, many talented individuals from

7384-537: The low realm of the burlesque. Don Quixote modified the satire of romances: its hero lost contact with reality by reading too many romances in the Amadisian tradition. Other important works of the tradition are Paul Scarron 's Roman Comique (1651–57), the anonymous French Rozelli with its satire on Europe's religions, Alain-René Lesage 's Gil Blas (1715–1735), Henry Fielding 's Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), and Denis Diderot 's Jacques

7488-463: The mainstay of selecting officials at most levels of administration. Despite the hierarchical tendencies of Confucianism, scholar-officials and ministers are not mere obedient subordinates of the ruler, but theoretically have equal roles in the maintenance of social order. This includes the possibility of running counter against or opposing the ruler, should he prove to be unfit to uphold righteous principles and fail to provide and promote well-being for

7592-420: The meaning of "trivial facts" rather than the Western definition of novel. Such classification also left a strong legacy in several East Asian interpretations of the Western definition of “novel” at the time when Western literature was first introduced to East Asian countries. For example, Thanh Lãng and Nhất Linh classified the epic poems such as The Tale of Kiều as "novel", while Trần Chánh Chiếu emphasized

7696-417: The modern image of the medieval is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the word "medieval" evokes knights, distressed damsels, dragons, and such tropes. The term "novel" originates from the production of short stories, or novella that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, and humorous stories designed to make

7800-399: The modern novel as an alternative to the chivalric romance began with the publication of Miguel de Cervantes ' novel Don Quixote : "the first great novel of world literature". It continued with Scarron 's Roman Comique (the first part of which appeared in 1651), whose heroes noted the rivalry between French romances and the new Spanish genre. In Germany an early example of the novel

7904-453: The most eloquent writers and erudite scholars achieved high positions, the system lacked formal safeguards against political corruption, only the Confucian moral teachings tested by the examinations. Once their political futures were secured by success in the examinations, officials were tempted by corruption and abuse of power. The Princeton scholar Benjamin Elman writes that some criticized

8008-438: The most important landmarks" of the novels of China. There have been a number of groupings. Romance of the Three Kingdoms , Journey to the West , Water Margin and The Plum in the Golden Vase were grouped by publishers in the early Qing and promoted as Four Masterworks ( Chinese : 四大奇書 ; pinyin : Sìdàqíshú ; lit. 'four great masterpieces'). Because of its explicit descriptions of sex, The Plum in

8112-501: The new customers of popular histories, rather than readers of belles lettres . The Amadis was a multi–volume fictional history of style, that aroused a debate about style and elegance as it became the first best-seller of popular fiction. On the other hand, Gargantua and Pantagruel , while it adopted the form of modern popular history, in fact satirized that genre's stylistic achievements. The division, between low and high literature, became especially visible with books that appeared on both

8216-469: The novel did not occur until after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439, and the rise of the publishing industry over a century later. Long European works continued to be in poetry in the 16th century. The modern European novel is often said to have begun with Don Quixote in 1605. Another important early novel was the French pastoral novel L'Astrée by Honore d'Urfe , published in 1610. Romance or chivalric romance

8320-410: The people. Thus, the balance of power is ideally split between the meritocratic Confucian scholars and the dynastic emperors, and a ruler should maintain power with the acceptance of their ministers, who have the ultimate right to sanction and forcibly depose a tyrannical or failing ruler. During the Song and Ming dynasties, Confucian philosophers combined Taoist and Buddhist thought to produce

8424-453: The plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action. The result is a valorization of "fine feeling", displaying the characters as models of refined, sensitive emotional affect. The ability to display such feelings was thought at this time to show character and experience, and to help shape positive social life and relationships. An example of this genre is Samuel Richardson 's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), composed "to cultivate

8528-467: The plot of novels that emphasise virtue. The prostitute Fanny Hill learns to enjoy her work and establishes herself as a free and economically independent individual, in editions one could only expect to buy under the counter. Less virtuous protagonists can also be found in satirical novels, like Richard Head 's English Rogue (1665), that feature brothels, while women authors like Aphra Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of

8632-427: The popular and belles lettres markets in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries: low chapbooks included abridgments of books such as Don Quixote . The term "chapbook" is also in use for present-day publications, commonly short, inexpensive booklets. Heroic Romance is a genre of imaginative literature, which flourished in the 17th century, principally in France. The beginnings of modern fiction in France took

8736-562: The publication of histories that dared not risk an unambiguous assertion of their truth. The literary market-place of the late 17th and early 18th century employed a simple pattern of options whereby fictions could reach out into the sphere of true histories. This permitted its authors to claim they had published fiction, not truth, if they ever faced allegations of libel. Prefaces and title pages of seventeenth and early eighteenth century fiction acknowledged this pattern: histories could claim to be romances, but threaten to relate true events, as in

8840-400: The role of vernacular literature in literary circles. In the late imperial periods, with the widespread of commercial printing, Chinese novels also became heavily circulated across East and Southeast Asia; it was reported in 1604, several hundreds of titles of Chinese books came through to the port city of Nagasaki alone, and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, estimated over

8944-479: The same space with academic histories and modern journalism had been criticized by historians since the end of the Middle Ages: fictions were "lies" and therefore hardly justifiable at all. The climate, however, changed in the 1670s. The romance format of the quasi–historical works of Madame d'Aulnoy , César Vichard de Saint-Réal , Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras , and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer , allowed

9048-438: 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

9152-414: The style was fresh and plain; the focus was on modern life, and on heroes who were neither good nor bad. The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip and scandal fueled the rise of the novel/novella. Stories were offered as allegedly true recent histories, not for the sake of scandal but strictly for the moral lessons they gave. To prove this, fictionalized names were used with the true names in

9256-433: 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

9360-519: The term " classic novels " in reference to these six titles is a "neologism of twentieth-century scholarship" that seems to have come into common use under the influence of C. T. Hsia's The Classic Chinese Novel . He adds that he is not sure at what point in the Qing or early twentieth century this became a "fixed critical category", but the grouping appears in a wide range of critical writing. Paul Ropp notes that "an almost universal consensus affirms six works as truly great". Hsia views them as "historically

9464-671: The term that in later times came to be used for fiction. Early examples of narrative classics include Bowuzhi , 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 Yijian Zhi . The novel as an extended prose narrative that realistically creates a believable world evolved in China and in Europe from

9568-522: The vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain . Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press . Miguel de Cervantes , author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as

9672-468: The way for the great novels of the 18th century. Plaks further shows these Ming novels share formal characteristics. They almost all contain more than 100 chapters; are divided into ten-chapter narrative blocks, each broken into two- to three-chapter episodes; are arranged in symmetrical halves; and arrange their events in patterns that follow seasons and geography. They manipulated the conventions of popular storytelling in an ironic way in order to go against

9776-480: The word 小說 ( variant Traditional Chinese and Shinjitai : 小説 ; Simplified Chinese : 小说 ; Hangeul : 소설 ; Pinyin : xiǎoshuō ; Jyutping : siu syut ; Wugniu : siau-seq 7 ; Peh-oe-ji : sió-soat ; Hepburn : shōsetsu ; Revised : soseol ; Vietnamese : tiểu thuyết ), which literally means "small talks", to refer to works of fiction of whatever length. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures,

9880-496: The word "novel" at the cost of its rival, the romance, remained a Spanish and English phenomenon, and though readers all over Western Europe had welcomed the novel(la) or short history as an alternative in the second half of the 17th century, only the English and the Spanish had openly discredited the romance. But the change of taste was brief and Fénelon's Telemachus [ Les Aventures de Télémaque ] (1699/1700) already exploited

9984-572: Was a compilation of one hundred novelle told by ten people—seven women and three men—fleeing the Black Death by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills, in 1348. The modern distinction between history and fiction did not exist in the early sixteenth century and the grossest improbabilities pervade many historical accounts found in the early modern print market. William Caxton 's 1485 edition of Thomas Malory 's Le Morte d'Arthur (1471)

10088-461: Was coined in the 19th century. The corresponding French and German terms are bibliothèque bleue (blue book) and Volksbuch , respectively. The principal historical subject matter of chapbooks was abridgements of ancient historians, popular medieval histories of knights, stories of comical heroes, religious legends, and collections of jests and fables. The new printed books reached the households of urban citizens and country merchants who visited

10192-405: Was not exactly new. Plato 's dialogues were embedded in fictional narratives and his Republic is an early example of a Utopia . Ibn Tufail 's 12th century Philosophus Autodidacticus with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island, and the 13th century response by Ibn al-Nafis , Theologus Autodidactus are both didactic narrative works that can be thought of as early examples of

10296-403: Was of little interest in any case. While tradition attributes Water Margin to Shi Nai'an , there is little or no reliable information on him or even confidence that he existed. The novel, or portions of it, may have been written by Luo Guanzhong , perhaps Shi's student, who was the reputed author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms , or by Shi Hui ( 施惠 ) or Guo Xun ( 郭勛 ). Journey to the West

10400-461: Was revived by Romanticism , in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel . Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne , Herman Melville , Ann Radcliffe , and John Cowper Powys , preferred the term " romance ". Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel , which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that

10504-469: Was sold as a true history, though the story unfolded in a series of magical incidents and historical improbabilities. Sir John Mandeville 's Voyages , written in the 14th century, but circulated in printed editions throughout the 18th century, was filled with natural wonders, which were accepted as fact, like the one-footed Ethiopians who use their extremity as an umbrella against the desert sun. Both works eventually came to be viewed as works of fiction. In

10608-512: Was the first best-seller of modern fiction, the Spanish Amadis de Gaula , by García Montalvo. However, it was not accepted as an example of belles lettres . The Amadis eventually became the archetypical romance, in contrast with the modern novel which began to be developed in the 17th century. Many different genres of literature made their debut during the Edo period in Japan, helped by

10712-463: Was the golden age for scholar-officials. By this time, passing the Imperial Examination had become the major path for people to hold an official position in the government. With the continuous improvements and reforms of Imperial Examination, the bureaucracy completely replaced the aristocracy, and the scholar-officer's polity was completely established. Song was the only dynasty in Chinese history that provided scholar-officials judicial privilege. Due to

10816-468: Was the inventor of what have since been known as the Heroical Romances. In these there was experienced a violent recrudescence of the old medieval elements of romance, the impossible valour devoted to a pursuit of the impossible beauty, but the whole clothed in the language and feeling and atmosphere of the age in which the books were written. In order to give point to the chivalrous actions of

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