Transmutation. Xia Culture In The Ancient Chinese Novel

The development of Gallant is a transformation process from historical records to literatures, resulting in the appearance of "The Gallant Literature". There always are some signs of Gallant in all types of ancient Chinese literature writing. We can boldly suppose that there is a tradition of Gallant in the long history of Chinese culture, besides the three main traditions, Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. The three main traditions are prevailing in the major traditional culture, while the tradition of Gallant is popular in the minority traditional culture. However, the major and minority traditions are not isolated, but interacted, so there are many cultural factors and multivariant cultural faces in the characteristics of Gallant. My research is to dig out the tradition of Gallant which is covered by the classical cultures and to reveal the civil discourse which is always overbeared by the rights-talk.This article is focused on the ancient "Chinese gallant court writing". The basic idea is to form the whole article by the opinion of Cultural Gallant basing on the previous and contemporary researches, then to build a cultural pedigree of Gallant by teasing up the "Gallant in history" and the "Gallant in novel", and to describe the development of the Chinese gallant spirit in the novel history, finally, to clear up and build the two clues, Gallant & the political culture and Gallant & the passion culture, in the history of the Chinese gallant novels, from the view of typology. It is the new idea which is different from other analogous studies.This article contains six chapters, besides a preface and a conclusion.First of all, it clears up the "Gallant in history" and the "Gallant in novel" for the origin of Gallant culture, and elicits the conception of "Cultural Gallant". In short, the Cultural Gallant is pointing to the cultural dimension and the personality spirit in the Gallant, which is a kind of cultural construction and idealistic appearance. And it advances the idea of the multi-structure of Gallant, basing on adducing lots of previous studies, to redefine the culture structure of Gallant from the transformation of the Thinking Processes.Chapters II and III takes "the transformation of gallant culture in the ancient Chinese literature" as title, and re-describes the transform slot of gallant spirit by stages, by following the respective modality and development of the gallant novels in classic Chinese and the gallant novels in colloquial Chinese. Generally speaking, whatever in classic Chinese or colloquial Chinese, the gallant always change from injustice to justice, from offending law to protecting law, which is a road to take virtues instead of impulsion and take highbrow instead of lowbrow. In Chapters IV and V, I describe and descentize the Chinese gallant novel. There are two clues to the development of gallant novel: the combination of gallant and the political culture ("loyalty") resulting to the "great gallant" protecting nation and people and the combination of gallant and passion culture resulting to heroes characterized by passion and love. The two clues affected subsequent novels a lot, until Jin Yong combined them together. The combination of gallant and politics is not only the combination of the ethic in secular world and the ethic in politics, but the reconstruction of the major traditional culture to the minority traditional culture. And the combination of justice and loyalty is not simply to add the two together, but means that the signifiant of loyalty contains the signifie of justice while the signifiant of justice contains the signifie of loyalty. The confluence of gallant novels and old whodunit stories, in fact, is the confluence of secular culture and court culture in the history of gallant culture.In the relationship between men and women, gallant experienced a process from loveless to love, and from the merciless to favorite. This process is finished between the Ming-Qing dynasties, when Feng Menglong firstly used the word "gallant" and "passion" together, and his book, "Hao Qiu Zhuan", is famous for its creation. This transformation broke the barrier between the gallant novel and the romantic fiction, communicated the heroes and lovers, and overthrew the common notion that heroes should not deeply involve in love ("er nv qing chang, ying xiong qi duan"), so "gentleman making a fine match" ("jun zi hao qiu") became "gallant making a fine match" ("xia yi hao qiu"). From the "The Story of Child Heroes" ("er n vying xiong zhuan"), the gallant women changed from "going out of home" to "returning home".In Chapter VI, I take Three Heroes and Five Gallants (Sanxia Wuyi) fiction series as a case study. First, I use discourse analysis to dig out the conception of payment which is deeply covered in the gallant action. "Payment" is a very important foundation composing the relationship of Chinese society. The interaction of "payment" means the value tendency and the sensible law, which composing the inner principle of gallant novels. The gallants' dependence to good official in Three Heroes and Five Gallants (Sanxia Wuyi) is indeed coming from the tradition of payment. Second, on the character analysis, I emphasize the theory, focusing the character itself, which is high valued by Hu Shi, and reconstructed it in modern meanings to dig out a new theory about "the other", which supports a very important local resource to the rethinking of subjectivity nowadays. Third, on the writing style analysis, I make a difference from traditional analysis for revert the original factor and folk characteristic, by challenging the culture regular, clearing up the discourse authority, and rushing the esthetic law. Moreover, in the Secular Discourse ("ping hua") narration, there is a kind of tendency of narrative democratization. This so-called democratization is not a political conception, but a relative word opposite aristocrat and elegance on the inner cultural standpoint, identity and spirit. The civilian standpoint of the Secular Discourse decides that its narration is not absolutism, but deliberative democracy.