Jiang Yingke Novel Research

Jiang Yingke was a leading figure of the literary genre known as GongAn besides thethree Yuan brothers in Ming Dynasty. The novels he wrote reveals a wide range of aspects ofsocial life in his time, from folk customs, street gossips and anecdotes to regulations, downsides of the imperial exam system and the dark sides of bureaucrats circle. The existence ofthese novels expanded the artistic area of Gong An genre in terms of content as well as form.Jiang’s novels explored a new area besides soul verse in Gong An history and made him anindispensable figure in the novel writing circle in late Ming Dynasty.This paper chooses Jiang Yingke’s novels as the main research object, and studys them inthe following independent aspects.First, It reviews literatures on Jiang’s novels that has been published by now. It paysspecial attention to the comments made by researchers before the foundation of PRC and thecontemporary monographs and papers, as well as the the analysis of different versions ofJiang’s novels.Next, the paper goes on to discuss several specific aspects of Jiang’s novels.The first chapter probes into the creation background of Jiang. It divides Jiang’s life intothe period of study and the period of career and discusses the political, economic and culturalenvironment in each period.Chapter two summarizes Jiang’s novels. It classifies Jiang’s novels on the stylisticperspective, followed by an in-depth exploration of Jiang’s motivation of creating thesenovels.Chapter three studies Jiang’ s existing novels by category. It classifies his novels in thebook <Jiang Yingke Miscellanea> into three category and researches on its expressing mannerand features separately.Chapter four and five are the main parts of this paper. They focus on the ideological andcultural implications and aesthetic connotations. When probing into the thought and contentof Jiang’s novels, this thesis attaches detailed insight into three important aspects: themerciless reveal of the corrupted officialdom, sincere admiration to legendary people and theheartfelt description of folk’s daily life. In order to correctly understand and display theaesthetic connotations of Jiang’s novels, the paper studies them in three aspects: style,rhetorics and technique and several elements: characters, plots, comments, fables, humour andetc.. In the last part, the paper summarizes the current study on classical Chinese novels,points out the reason why Jiang Yingke’s novels haven’t been paid much attention before onthe basis of the research did in this paper and predicts a possible future of study in this area.