A Study On Fictions About Legal Cases In Ming Dynasty

The fictions concerned with legal cases in Ming Dynasty, which occupies a significant position in the history of the fictions about legal cases, has attracted increasing attention of the critics. However, viewed from the present research work in this respect, the study in this field is not thorough and systematic for most of the researchers merely focus on the origin of the stories concerned or the peripheral materials, leaving out the stories themselves and the implication of the stories. In order to fill in the void, the author of this thesis attempts to research on the fictions about the legal cases in Ming Dynasty.This thesis falls into three chapters.In the first chapter, the author traces the development of fictions about legal cases, introduces the present research work in this field, and elaborates the reasons for the prosperity of fictions about legal cases in Ming Dynasty. There are many definitions for this kind of fiction. The author believes that from the perspective of the patterns of the adjudication, the fictions about legal cases refer to the fictions centering on the process of the adjudicating of the cases by the officials. Detection and adjudication are the two key factors in these fictions and the heroes in theses fictions are the officials appointed for settling the cases. And the foremost purpose of these fictions is to eulogize those honest and upright officials and make a complaint against those corrupt officials who tramp human life as wild grass. The fictions about legal cases reached its flourishing period in Ming Dynasty, especially the emergence of adjudication in written form marked the peak of its development. There are two reasons for its prosperity: one is the inherent law of the legal cases, and the other is the opportunities provided by the social background at that time.The second chapter focuses on the two patterns of adjudicating a case—namely Heaven adjudication and Human adjudication. Heaven adjudication mainly originated from the ghosts and gods worship among the people. And Human adjudication is based on the five following methods: investigating , adjudication through wisdom, reasoning and collecting evidence, etc. These various methods not only signal the growing weight of human wisdom in the adjudication but also mark the maturing of the writing style in fictions about legal cases. What's more, in these fictions, people pay more attention to collecting evidence, rather than merely rely on the officials' wisdom.