News, public opinions and history: Fiction on current events in seventeenth-century China

This dissertation focuses on a number of seventeenth-century novels that are known as "shishi xiaoshuo" (fiction on current events). Unlike the majority of earlier fictional works, whose topics were events and figures in the past, these works were written to influence and even shape the "public opinions" of the novelists' own times and were intended as an act of direct intervention aimed at contemporary politics. This persistent focus on contemporaneity and the explicit generic inclination to participate in the contemporary political debate were related to the booming industry of commercial publishing and the flourishing book market during this period. My study will further our understanding of the important cultural and political functions Chinese fiction assumed in the late imperial period. At the same time, it will also deepen our appreciation of some of the unique aspect the seventeenth-century Chinese society, which was probably much more pluralistic than many historians so far have let us to believe.