Four ancient wonderful books

The "Four Wonders Books" refer to the four classical novels, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, The Journey to the West and Jin Ping Mei, which are also called "Four Wonders Books of the Ming Dynasty" because they were all written by Ming people. This statement was first put forward by Feng Menglong, a novelist in the late Ming Dynasty. The so-called "strangeness" not only refers to the novelty in content and art, but also refers to the development of these books to the novel genre itself. The "Four Wonder Books" respectively created four traditions of China's classical novels: historical romance tradition, heroic legend tradition, ghost novel tradition and world love novel tradition.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms was written by Luo Guanzhong in the early Ming Dynasty on the basis of folklore and related dramas, and it was the first chapter-by-chapter novel of China. The novel is not profound, the writing is not vulgar, the momentum is vigorous and eloquent.

The Water Margin was also written by Shi Naian in the early Ming Dynasty. Like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it is also created on the basis of folk stories, scripts and operas. The Water Margin is China's first novel about peasant uprising. Focusing on the clue of "officials forcing people to rebel", the book tells a permanent political topic-the relationship between rebels and political power within the legal political power system. This novel was rated as the "Fifth Talented Book" among the "Six Talented Books" by Jin Shengtan, a famous literary critic in Qing Dynasty, and it was reduced from one hundred chapters to seventy chapters.

The Journey to the West was first created orally by many folk artists, and was finally completed by Wu Cheng'en during the Jiajing period. This is the best fairy tale in China. With the help of the story of master Xuanzang, a monk in the Tang Dynasty, learning from the West, Buddhism and Taoism are integrated into one furnace, and a supernatural world is fantasized.

Jin Ping Mei is different from the collective creation of the first three novels. It is the first novel written by China, which was written in the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty. The author signed Xiao Xiaosheng in Lanling, and I still don't know why. The theme of Jin Ping Mei evolved from the story of "Song Wu killed his wife" in Water Margin, and it was the first novel that turned its attention to ordinary people. Jin Ping Mei had a great influence on later novels, and A Dream of Red Mansions was obviously influenced by it. Because of its obscenity, it has been banned since the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

"Water Margin" story print "Three Zhujiazhuang"