A Study On Jiao Hong’s ’Shishuoti’ Novels

Compiling ’Shishuoti’ novel was very popular in Ming dynasty. Jiao Hong, the Number One scholar in Wanli era, Ming dynasty, was full of enthusiasm about compiling’Shishuoti’ novels. He accomplished compiling three such novels Mingshishuo which was lost, Jiaoshileilin and Yutangcongyu.Although the academics did some researches about Jiao Hong’s two remained books concerning’Shishuoti’, there is no one who makes an intensive study of it as a whole part. Jiao Hong sat Shishuoxinyu as model when compiling Jiaoshileilin and Yutangcongyu. These two books were associated with each other in contents and styles. First, based on Jiao Hong’s reading notes, the two books were compiled. So the contents of these two books were in time order. That is, the contents of Jiaoshileilin were from ancient times to Yuan dynasty. Yutangcongyu was edited on the deeds of members of Imperial Academy before the Wanli era, Ming dynasty. Second, these two books adopt Shishuoxinyu’s stylistic style, which is, classifying. That Jiao Hong chose this style was not only influenced by the compiling boom of’Shishuoti’at that time, but also based on his sincere love towards Shishuoxinyu.Jiao Hong’s works showed inheritance and innovation. Thirty one categories of Shishuoxinyu were adopted by Jiaoshileilin and Yutangcongyu. More specifically, twenty three categories of Jiaoshileilin and twenty one categories of Yutangcongyu were copied from Shishuoxinyu. Jiaoshileilin composed thirty two categories of its own and Yutangcongyu composed twenty five. Meanwhile, Jiao Hong learned some compiling experiences from Encyclopedia. That showed Jiao Hong intended to combine his books with Enclopedia.The contents of Jiao Hong’s two books were various covering classics, history, philosophy and belles-letters. Through analysis, I found out most of the contents were from history especially unofficial history and philosophy particularly anecdotes novels. The choice of contents, in a large degree, decided the nature of books. So, it was reasonable that some academics studied these two books as historic books. That we study it from literary aspect also makes sense.Talking about the standards for valuing characters, Jiao’s two books were different from Shishuoxinyu. In overall, Shishuoxinyu was more amusing compared with Jiao Hong’s books which has a function to educate people. More specifically, Jiao Hong praised people who were kind, dutiful, loyal, disinterested and well-learned.Jiao Hong’s two books concerning’shishuoti’ showed a high level of composing. It seems like his writings didn’t have relations with each other, but in fact, it was consistent with each other. In the figure-composing respect, Jiao Hong put emphasis on character’s appearance, psychology and contrast etc. His language is brief, meaningful and enchanting.