Love Letters·Novels·Social Conditions

In the late Ming Dynasty, with the billowy trend of romanticism thoughts, love letter, as a unique letter style, was recorded by various categories of publications and became prevalent. Collected in some way, love letters possess the readability of novels. The fast spread of love novels in the late Ming Dynasty contributed to the close relationship between the love letter and novel during that period. This paper intends to examine the novels, further the social conditions in the late Ming Dynasty by investigating the love letters at that time.The paper consists of five chapters. The first chapter defines the love letter. We describe the history of ancient letters and the particular importance of love letters. We distinguish various styles of love letters. We also clearly identify the research area and motivations. The second chapter classifies the publications which recorded the love letters in the late Ming Dynasty and investigates the regularity of the existence of the love letters. Chapter 3 examines the importance of love letters to novels in literature styles. Meanwhile, we analyze the phenomena that novels recording love letters in the later Ming Dynasty are mainly in the style of novels about the social conditions. Chapter 4 focuses on the study on the love letter collection titled "Feng Yun Love Letter". We investigate how the love letter in the late Ming Dynasty was novelized by examining the establishment of interpersonal relationship, scenario styles, psychological description, and characteristic shaping et al. Chapter 5 investigates, through the love letter, such social conditions as publication culture, females, mentality transition in the late Ming Dynasty.Research on the love letters in the late Ming Dynasty enables us to examine the characteristics and complexity of ancient novels from a new dimension. By studying the love letters, we can gradually further study the social mood, opinions of love and various love relationships in the late Ming Dynasty. Love letters in the late Ming Dynasty is a good research topic deserving our careful investigation. We hope this paper can contribute to the current researches on the novels and social conditions in the late Ming Dynasty.