| Popular in the south of the Yangtze River,the play is popular with audiences in the north and south of the country for its melodious tunes,simple and elegant performance forms and fascinating story content.However,less attention has been paid to the fact that this art has a written form of expression in addition to the playing and singing in the bookstore.As early as the writing of a group of Ming and Qing dynasty girls,the creation of written lyrics had already begun,and they were good at writing "women dressed as men" themes,through the imagination of women to build a successful career,to become a general to meet their unfinished ideals.In addition,because it is mainly in the form of seven-word rhymes with poems,it shows purely written reading properties,and is different from the flexible playing and singing in the bookstore,many scholars also call it "playing fiction".The "play-word novel" showed a tendency to decline in the late Qing Dynasty,but was reappropriated by many scholars and given a new luster because of the folk influence of play-words.Before 1912,only sporadic works were written,and after 1920,most of them were unfinished works,although they continued the rhythm of the early Ming Dynasty.Only the fictional works written between 1912 and 1920 are more complete and systematic,not only in terms of quantity,but also in terms of collectivity and systematization of "one voice",which reveals from the side the creative mentality of the literati at the beginning of the Republic,as well as the influence of the political situation and cultural atmosphere on them.First of all,academic studies on the creation of bullet novels from 1912 to 1920 have mainly focused on overviews and close readings of individual works,and have not yet formed a more comprehensive and systematic view.The development of the newspaper industry in the early Republican period and the fact that a large number of literati had no way to enter the civil service and sold their writings for a living inadvertently influenced the creation of playful novels.The literati who strove for social change linked the"play-word novel" with the "novel" and explored its value in opening up the people’s wisdom.Because of the special relationship between folk songs and women,literati in the early Ming Dynasty used folk novels as a powerful tool to transform women’s thinking.Secondly,the creation of fiction from 1912 to 1920 still insisted on making women’s writing the core of creation.In the late Qing dynasty,the creation of bullet-word novels had already nurtured a "new change" in the role of women,and in the hands of the Yuanyang and Butterfly School,the image of women showed a strong secular meaning.The experience of marriage under Pao Shengduo’s writing,and the "combination of East and West" under Cheng Zhanlu’s writing,are both the embodiment of the cultural situation in the early Ming Dynasty.As the only female writer who wrote fictional novels during the early Ming Dynasty,female writer Wu Rui Xian also created a series of fictional novels to express herself.Although she,like the boudoir girls of the Ming and Qing dynasties,was not immune to self-appreciation in her texts,she finally came out of her boudoir to participate in the discussion of social events and to criticize the evils of the times in her play-word novels,with a boldness very different from that of her predecessors.Furthermore,the "re-writing" of old themes was one of the styles of the early Minzu fiction,most evident in the fiction novels in Women’s Magazine and Monthly Novel.The novels published in these two magazines were based on historical stories,with Women’s Magazine selecting historical materials related to women and Novel Monthly selecting moral models of traditional loyalty and righteousness.Both magazines handle historical material by retaining the outlines of the stories while focusing on amplifying elements of traditional morality.The Women’s Magazine published many bullet novels promoting chastity aimed at female readers,with the intention of creating a model of virtuous and virtuous women.This was due not only to the authorities’ increasingly strict moral education of women,but also to editor-in-chief Wang Yunzhang’s expectations of the "ideal woman" and classical sentiments.When publishing fictional novels,the Monthly Novel showed a duality between Chinese and Western cultures,promoting Western scientific knowledge while preserving traditional moral and ethical concepts,an orientation that was inseparable from editor-in-chief Yun Tieqiao’s "new style of fictional novels" and the situation of the Monthly Novel.Throughout the period from 1912 to 1920,most of the writers were proficient in national studies and had studied Western studies.Faced with the baptism of the European wind and the American rain,they did not want to lag behind the times,and they also harbored anxiety about the imminent loss of tradition.The literati of the early Republican period wrote novels with bulletins,which was their attempt to retain the old style.In addition to their sensual aesthetic orientation,the problems of the times,such as moral slippage and the abuse of Western ideas,prompted them to use play-word novels to discipline women,to make them understand "freedom" without being too free,and to hope that a proper balance could be struck between Chinese and Western ideas.Such a vision of a "moral utopia" is,on the surface,a stagnation of literati thought,but it is a normal phenomenon in the development of literary history.When radical Westernized ideas collide with traditional morality,contradictions and controversies are the very process of literary history. |
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