The Study Of Merchant Novels In "San Yan And Er Pai"

As one of pinnacles among storyteller's scripts in the Ming Dynasty and even Chinese classic popular short stories,"San Yan and Er Pai"(three collections of short stories edited by Feng Menglong and two volumes of Amazing Stories edited by Long Mengchu) contain a large amount of"merchant novels"making bibliographies for merchants, the principal part of townspeople, which have been regarded as the most splendid chapter in the Chinese merchant novels. Taking"San Yan and Er Pai"as the research objects and adopting a comprehensive method of both probing into historical materials and reviewing texts, the present paper, on the one hand, intend to initially comb the evolution of merchant novels, tracing their origins and untangling the concrete process and laws under which they originated, matured, transferred and flourished, and investigate the social background of merchant novels'prosperity from the following three perspectives, namely"the shift of value on profit and loyalty","the birth of the new concepts of four strata"and"the forming of merchants'awareness"; On the other hand, is based on the research methods and contributions of history and socio-culture subjects, etc. and conducting pattern analysis and case studies over"destiny","human relationship"and"human nature", to explore the risks and hardships suffered by the merchants in late Ming Dynasty and analyze their value on business-dominant occupation, their put-profit-ahead of-reputation concept and their outlook on profit and loyalty; to make clear that it is the concepts of"profit first"as a prime mover that stimulated merchants in late Ming Dynasty to venture and go through thick and thin and therefore created the socio-economic prosperity, meanwhile, merchants actualized their personal worth and gained deserved respect from society, which the present author considers to be the subversion over the traditional concept of"loyalty first, profit second"and"loyalty and profit division"as well as the go-beyond over the concept of"regard Confucius as superior to business". While fully emphasizing profit, merchant novels also denounced the gainful and avaricious behaviors and pointed out the right way to make profits is the one with both profit and loyalty cherished. During discoursing upon merchants'families and marital life, the present paper tries to dig up their strong feelings for spiritual freedom expressed in merchants'love stories though analyzing the contents concerned such plots as loyal love and disloyal marriages; while tasting their happy marriages, to experience their queries and challenges to the Confucian codes binding up their souls. The present paper maintains that these works expressed the respect for human relationship and human nature and the pursuit for rational desires, and at the meantime, expressed disapproval of the social situation full of bald-faced material desires. Merchant novels advocated the concepts of...