A Discussion On The Type Of Internet Pseudo-history

As we entered the21st century, a new genre of literature came into being:they write about "emperors and the age of kings","rise and fall of wars","historical events and biographies", etc. However, they differ from the traditional sense of "official history" which advertises a "impartial" and "objective" view, nor could they be categorized as fictional historical novel either. In most cases, authors of these literatures are not engaged in any areas related to the study of literature or history. Nevertheless, they all claim themselves as "serious historical writers" and what they wrote are the actual history. The popularity of these authors and their literatures can mostly contribute to Internet media: Almost all of these literatures were first published in some large-scale virtual communities. As a result of their skyrocketing click-through rates, they gained favor with print media, and then, led to sales miracle. On one hand, this type of literature gained its popularity and praise among the general public. On the other hand, they were criticized by many experts and scholars from the academia. Nevertheless, this new genre of literature set off the trend of writing and reading historical stories on the Internet all over China. This new genre is called Internet pseudo-history. The features of this type of writing, which differentiate it from all kinds of literatures in the past, coupled with the countless readers they’ve reached and their great social effects, have brought some degrees of impact and influence to the academia of history and literature study. Thus, the author of this paper tries to investigate and analyze the development and evolution of Internet pseudo-history literature, its text features, and other related issues by approaching from media culture typologies.This paper is organized as follows:Introduction, this section identifies the object and scope of the study. It first discusses the origin of Internet pseudo-history literature and some well-recognized pieces. Then, the current development of these writings and their social impact are summarized. Last, the importance and necessity of this study are pointed out. The first chapter walks through the evolution of the genre of "historical" writings. It reveals that the reason for different forms of "historical" genres in different periods of time is due to the continuous development of mass media. The second chapter conducts the study in the domain of media culture. It analyzes specific writing pieces, approaches from the methods of literature production, the products (i.e. the text itself), and the main bodies of the literature production (e.g. authors), discusses the new features of the Internet pseudo-history literature under the influence of Internet media. Chapter three tries to position and review the Internet pseudo-history genre based on the discussions from previous two chapters. It points out that, as narrative folk tales of historical events, this type of literature has always been closely related to and shaped by the mass media.