A Comparative Study Of Huaben And Nihuaben Fiction In Sanyan

As one of the classical anthologies of ancient Chinese short story, Sanyan has engagedscholars’ full measure of passion as early as1920s, and accordingly the relative researches areprosperous especially in the past several decades. Building on these efforts already done, andstarting from the fact that Sanyan is a collection of both Huaben and Nihuaben, this projectsets out to analyse Sanyan in a more comprehensive way by comparing two kinds of fictionsfrom one book. Generally speaking, my research is composed by the following four parts:In the first section, I would like to devote certain space to illustrate those concepts whichhave been defined many times however never come to an agreement: Huaben, Huaben fiction,Nihuaben, Nihuaben fiction. Through comparison, both in time and space, the first chapteraims to establish a more scientific and complete system in which all concepts have cleardefinitions. Furthermore, I also classify the short stories into two categories in this section:Huaben fiction and Nihuaben fiction, given that some stories may belong to the above twocategories at the same time, I will avoid using them as arguments.The second section mainly compare the subject and character in Huaben fiction with thatin Nihuaben fiction. In the marriage subject, we will find a perfect balance of character’sconstruction in Huaben fiction, but such a balance can not be found in the latter. Huabenficiton also manifests strong conflicts in female characters while in Nihuaben fiction,femalecharacters seem to be rather gentle. In Gong’an subject, the image of judge transformed fromgod as in Huaben fiction to human in Nihuaben. In zhiguai subject, Huaben fictions focus onthe supernatural miracles, however Nihuaben fictions tell more of the realistic wonder. Inmerchant subject, Nihuaben fiction created much more merchants than Huaben fiction, andmany of them showed new personalities.The plot and structure are the topics of the third section. Huaben fiction paid moreattention to conflicts of plot, the Nihuaben fiction,however, was more skillful to fabriccoincidence. Besides, this section also discusses the distinctive and common aspects in structure,The fourth section analyses the language styles of the two set of fictions. On one hand,both fictions were developed from script of storytelling, then they inevitably shared thelanguage style of performance. On the other hand, Nihuaben fiction developed some newdimensions in language usage:the critical sentence appeared more often, and the poetic wordshad new functions.