The Research On Cai Yuanfang’s Fictional Commentary

Cai Yuanfang, whose given name is ao and courtesy name Yuanfang and who also styled himself as Qidu mengfu and Yeyun zhuren, was a native of Jiangning with no textual research on his life. He was a commenter on novels of Qing Dynasty. As the refiner and critisimer of the two books The Bibliography of Many Nations in Eastern Zhou Danasty and Sequel to The Water Margins, Cai Yuanfang revised the novels very carefully and wrote lots of detailed remarks, contributing to the spread of the two books in the middle of Qing Dynasty.On account of his concept of chronicle and theories of literary writing about subsequent creation, Cai Yuanfang contributed a lot to the later generations on appreciating and creating novles. Although Cai Yuanfang immitated or commented without substantial things in his fictional commentaty, his contribution exceeded greatly the defect. What’s more, as a literator, Cai Yuanfang took it consciously as his aesthetical standard to enlighten the common people when he reviewed novels, hoping that his work could contribute to the world and the minds of people. Moreover, Cai Yuanfang offered us a lot in understanding clearly the fictional commentary in the middle of Qing Dynasty and played an important role in the development of fictional commentary.