The Unique Personality And Historical Status Of Feng Zhenluan’s Commonts On Strange Tales Of A Lonely Studio

“Strange Tales of a Lonely Studio” is a pinnacle of the ancient classical Chineseshort stories, with its comments making experience and tradition of the novel critiqueof hundreds of years of China continue to develop. Feng Zhenluan, as one of thecritics who made comments on “Strange Tales of a Lonely Studio”, has certaininfluence on classical Chinese novels and the comments of later literature. However,Feng Zhenluan’s comments has been ignored by most ancient Chinese novel theoryresearchers due to several reasons such as the prevalence of the full-length vernacularnovel and Feng’s socail status at that time. This paper analyzes the unique personalityof Feng Zhenluan’s commonts on “Strange Tales of a Lonely Studio” and accuratelymakes them a historical status. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, thispaper consists of three parts.The first part is meant to make readers have an overall understanding of Feng’scomments from their comment form and their basic viewpoints. The second partmainly analyzes the unique personality of Feng’s comments from five aspects,including their comments with simple language, their consciousness focusing on theoverall structure, their comparative method of criticism, their comment perspectivefrom an unique knowledge and requirements of comment groups and their consciouscritical awareness. The third part compares Feng’s comments with those of three othercritics: Wang Shizhen, He Shouqi and Dan Minglun whose comment are famous inhistory. Based on this, the paper also compares Feng’s comments with novel critiquetheories made by Jin Shengtan, Mao Zonggang, Zhang Zhupo and Zhi Yanzhai, fromtheir comment form, figure portrayal, relation of article and events, writer’s creativethinking and their novel techniques, and analyzes their inheritance and developmenton novel critique theories, which shows an important historical status of Feng’scomments in the history of classical Chinese novel theory criticism.In the history of novel criticism, among those critics who made comments on“Strange Tales of a Lonely Studio”, Feng Zhenluan comes in second place, just behindDan Minglun, and he also may not share the same reputation as Jin Shengtan, Mao Zonggang, Zhang Zhupo and Zhi Yanzhai who are regarded as the first-class critics,but he is the first critic who comments classcal Chinese short novels with anfull-length vernacular novel theory. In a word, his comments have not only an uniquepersonality, but a important research value, making an significant influence on latercomments on “Strange Tales of a Lonely Studio”.