A Study Of The Legend Of The Hero And The Heroine

Martial arts novel has a long history in China, the development of which can be divided into five stages. Old myths and legends characterizes its germination, the Early Qin dynasty, the Eastern and Western Jin Dynasties witnesses its rudiment period, then it comes to the autumn of the Tang Dynasty, Song and Yuan Dynasties are the periods of expansion, and finally it reaches its high-tide period in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The Legend of the Hero and the Heroine is a long colloquial novel written in the Dao Guang period of the Qing Dynasty. The novel cannot be ranked as first class in terms of its substance and artistic expression, but it plays a significant role in the development of novel history for it establishes a new pattern of martial arts novel ----- the Legend of the Hero and the Heroine.The paper studies the novel from two aspects:1. The historical material study. Through contrasting the existing research findings, the paper finds their similarities and dissimilarities and employs methods of induction and analysis. The approach consists of the study of the writer, its writing process, versions and way of spreading.2. The genre study. The paper raises the question on its genre classification at first, then analyzes the causes to write the novel from the aspects of the writer and the novel history, and last concludes by mentioning that Wen Kang is not the first one to write this kind of novel, but he compounds the martial arts and love novels establishing the new genre, which is his contribution.