| Previous to the Late Qing Dynasty, the imperial civil service examination system as a scheme of selecting officials and education had existed over1000years. This system played a vital role in the development of the Chinese intellectual class and shaping their ideas. At the same time it also influenced their ideas of literature. Confronting the internal disturbance and foreign aggression, the Qing government was forced to take reform into consideration. The imperial examination system was no exception. At first, it underwent reform, but ended up with abolition due to its failure to select and train qualified talents to meet the need of the new era. The Qing authorities also established new-style schools as part of the reform efforts. There is no doubt that the intellectual class experienced the greatest impact since this stratum was built on the imperial examination system. The collapse of the old system had triggered tremendous change to their ideas, lifestyle, and concept of identity, intellectual structure and view of literature. And it is in this context that the conception and fictional writing began to change and develop in the Late Qing Dynasty.The influence on the intellectuals by the cancellation of the imperial examination system was various in degree with regard to the men of letters of different ages, representing a phenomenon of the succession of one generation of scholars by another in terms of the ideology, intellectual structure and view of fiction. The theory formulating and fiction writing in the Late Qing Dynasty were characterized by a progressive development which kept in step with the change of the ideas of the three successive generations in their trial and search before and after the abolition of the imperial examination. This dissertation is aimed at studying the development of the Late Qing fiction in the succession of different generations following the cancellation of the imperial examination system. This research will take as a starting point the very impact of the abolition of imperial examination system.Chapter1-2, addressing largely the historical background and presenting a panorama of the condition of the Late Qing intellectual class and their views and production of fiction. Chapter One traces the Late Qing intellectual stratum to its roots. First, the paper will trace how the gentry class came into existence in the Pre-Qin Period, how this class was differentiated under the influence of official selection systems of the Qin and the Han Dynasties, and then how various social classes with different features formed in the middle and late periods of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Next, the focus of this paper will turn to the impact of the imperial examination systems on the intellectual class during the Tang, Song, Ming and Qing periods. Notionally, the influence included the continuation of the consciousness of the scholars in the intellectual class. The imperial civil service examination resulted in the classification of society into scholar-bureaucrats, scholar-commoners and some other social classes.Literarily, on the one hand, the positive influence of the imperial examination system was on the training of a larger number of creative writers due to the influence of the literary element over its fundamental education and its massive influence.As a result, the intellectual stratum was significantly expanded and people’s awareness of literature was more extensively spread; on the other hand, its negative influence was the control of the literary awareness by the Confucian classics due to its increasing involvement. Consequently, this factor had imposed a considerable restraints upon the growth of literature. With the roots of the Late Qing intellectual stratum’s condition and its literary concepts determined, we will make an analysis of the features of the new generation of intellectual class in the social reform, which were different from those of the previous generation:e.g. ideologically, their acceptance of and attitude toward the Western learning after the Opium War, and literarily, the emergence of revolution, its resultant new concepts etc. in the poetry circles, republic of letters and fiction world. Chapter Two will discuss how the Late Qing intellectual stratum was influenced by the cancellation of the imperial civil service examination and how they were involved in the fiction. The abolition of the imperial examination system resulted in three generations of scholars equipped with different ideologies and intellectual structures:those who were born in the1840’s and1850’s with remarkable features of ancient scholars; those who were born in the1860’s and1870’s and had experienced transition from old scholars to new roles and those who were born in the1880’s and1890’s and had undergone transference from old education institutions to new-style schools or pursued academic studies abroad. The last batch of old-fashioned scholars got to realize the importance of mass enlightenment after they reviewed and summarized the lessons learned from the failures of the previous reform movements. So they began to turn their attention to the genre of fiction and expected to turn it into the means to popularize learning and ideas. Since then they started to advocate fiction with an unprecedented serious attitude. The abolition of imperial examination system provided an opportunity for the subsequent expansion of fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty. And the intellectual group who had experienced career transition now became the pillars to promote the fiction concepts and to write their own works of fiction. Having further shaken off the old literary ideas and ancient scholars’notions left over from the imperial examination system, the Chinese students of the modern schools at home and those at abroad became a new intellectual stratum. And this new group of men of letters began to add some new elements to the notion of fiction and its writing on the basis of the achievements of their two-generation predecessors, and from this very moment, the bud of modern fiction started to snrout in China.Chapter3-5, which discuss the three generations of intellectuals before and after the abolition of the imperial civil service examination. This part will review the three generations’ concepts of fiction and their fiction writing in the light of the critiques and works. Chapter Three will target at the scholars born in the1840’s and1850’s, who were not only the last batch of old-fashioned scholars, but also the first batch to take fiction seriously. Their main reasons for recommending fiction are that it could serve as a vehicle of publicity instead of as a valuable literary genre. On the whole, they advocated more than they wrote fiction. Only a few of them haphazardly took to fiction writing. Their works of fiction reserved plenty of esthetic heritages of the various types of traditional Chinese writings such as poetry, essays, historiography and biography.The major fiction critics discussed in this chapter include Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, Lin Shu, Liu E and so forth. Chapter Four will deal with the intellectual generation of the1860’s and1870’s. This group of intellectuals experienced the transition from the old-fashioned scholars to new careers. The dominant force of critics and writers were those who had transferred into the newspaper industry after the cancellation of the imperial examination system. Those men of letters who had entered into the newspaper industry demonstrated different tendencies in approaching fiction because they had different motives in pursuing this career. Some ran political newspapers and periodicals due to their interest in participating in politics, and others ran leisure, artistic and literary or fictional newspapers or magazines to earn their living or satisfy their interest. The former started their fiction career by translating foreign fiction, so they were more deeply influenced by foreign fiction and so they attached more importance to the function of publicity and ideological nature of fiction; The latter, however, started their fiction career by writing their own works of fiction on the basis of Chinese tradition, thus they paid more attention to the entertainment and techniques of fiction. However, with the development of their notion of fiction and the increase of their writing practice, there appeared an interaction between and confluence of the two propensities. Afterwards, a growing number of men of letters from the newspaper fiction circles began to work concurrently as critics, translators and writers all in one. Their works of fiction started to show the influence from both Western and traditional Chinese fiction.The fiction critics and writers to be discussed in this chapter are Xia Zengyou, Liang Qichao, Di Baoxian, Luo Pu, Chen Jinghan, Huang Boyao, Huang Shizhong, Wu Jianren, Li Boyuan, Zhou Guisheng, Xu Nianci, Sun Jiazhen, Zeng Mengpu, Huang Ren, Bao Tianxiao and so on. The object to be studied in Chapter Five is the group of fiction intellectuals who were born in the1880’s and1890’s. Many of them had the experience of pursuing their studies either in the new-style schools in China or in foreign countries. Having inherited the achievements accumulated by the previous two generations of fiction groups and changed their intellectual structure, this new group of intellectuals had presented a greater number of fresh elements in their concepts and their own works of fiction. Those who had inherited the legacy of political newspapermen attached no less importance to the ideological nature of fiction than their predecessors. In addition, they showed an even greater interest in the pursuit of the artistic quality of fiction in an attempt to transform Chinese fiction with the help of the experience of translating foreign fiction. However, those who had inherited the legacy of leisure, artistic and literary fiction newspapermen still based their fiction writing on the traditional Chinese manner in an effort to innovate fiction writing within the traditional framework with the aid of some of foreign fiction writing techniques. It should be noted that the differences between the former and latter groups existed mostly in the connotation and particular techniques of their works of fiction. The views they held on the fictional stylistic nature were essentially the same by this period of time. The fictional critics and writers to be addressed in this chapter include Zhou Shuren, Zhou Zuoren, Hu Shi, Liu Bannong, Xu Zhenya, Su Manshu, Zhou Shoujuan and so forth.Conclusion is reached on the basis of the main text. It summarizes the course of development and the characteristics of the literary fiction when the new generation of intellectuals took over from the old one in the Late Qing Dynasty before and after the cancellation of the imperial civil service examination. In addition, the concluding chapter is aimed at clarifying the fact that the major role that the May4th New Literature Movement played was to accelerate the development of modern Chinese fiction along the established route and should not be regarded as an impassable boundary. The institutional and educational reforms in the Late Qing Dynasty may be a more significant factor in affecting the development and transformation of modern Chinese literature, and thus it is necessary to devote a greater effort to the research of this field. Likewise, the various problems encountered, the successes enjoyed and the failures suffered by the Late Qing fiction in the process of the social transformation and commercialization can be useful lessons and experiences in contemporary China where the development of literature has displayed a tendency towards social transformation and commercialization.
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