A Study On The Scholage' Image In The Golden Lotus

The Golden Lotus is one of the four great masterpieces of Ming Dynasty, and also an outstanding work with unique creative style and outstanding artistic achievements in the history of Chinese literature. With his sharp vision and sobering creative attitude, Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng has an insight into the social reality of the middle and late periods of Ming Dynasty, delineating different people's problems of livelihood and narrating their vicissitudes of life. Although this novel is mainly a story in which a merchant Ximen Qing who gets on, then prospers and finally perishes, objectively it has successfully built up such a good many scholars'image as Zhuangyuan Cai, which is of high artistic value and much necessity to study.If the yardstick is like this: whether the scholars are smooth or not in the course of the imperial examinations, the scholars in the novel contain such three classes as Jinshi, Juren and Xiucai, who respectively represent their own life outlook of different classes. Basically, that can reflect the historical reality of the middle and late periods of Ming Dynasty. During the process of communication between different scholars and Ximen Qing, this novel portrays merchants'rising powers and the vicissitudes of scholars and merchants, thus arousing the author's interest in exploring the underlying causes for resulting in the corrupt practice of scholars. In addition, in comparison with the differences of the scholars'image in The Romance of Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh, Journey to the West, The Scholars, and A Dream of Red Mansions, the author makes efforts to study the inheritance and breakthrough of literature traditions made by The Golden Lotus in the Chinese novel history.This thesis consists of four parts.The first part analyzes emergence, development and evolution of the concept of the scholars, and defines its connotation and denotation.In the second part, the author divides the scholars depicted in this novel into three types: success, decline and failure in imperial examinations, and thus analyzes their images in detail.The third part analyzes the reasons for the low spirit of the scholars and the resulting serious consequences by virtue of introducing the imperial examination system of Ming Dynasty and demonstrating the various manifestations of corruption in imperial examination.The fourth section, adopting a historical point of view, analyzes the characteristics of traditional scholars and displays three types of scholars in the literature history: Ideal Type, Transitive Type from ideal to reality and Reality Type. The Golden Lotus not only inherits the descriptions of the traditional scholars' images, but also makes some new breakthroughs, and it is the pioneer of Reality Type of the scholars' image descriptions. It makes the scholars' image break away from the past scholars' idealized model, remove beautification and hyperbole to them, making them realistic and authentic. In terms of the scholars' vivid descriptions, The Golden Lotus has a great influence on The Scholars, and A Dream of Red Mansions and places an important position in the Chinese novel history.