Description Of Plague In Vernacular Novels Of The Ming And Qing Dynasties

The spread of the plague during the Ming and Qing dynasties not only brought countless sufferings and disasters to the people,but also had a great impact on the creation of vernacular novels.From the perspective of time,the occurrence of plague in the Ming and Qing dynasties showed obvious segmented features,and followed a spiraling trend from the middle of the Ming Dynasty.From the perspective of space,the distribution of endemic areas is uneven,mainly concentrated in economically developed and densely populated areas.As a result of the practical factor,a large number of plague writings have appeared in the vernacular novels based on people ‘s life in the Ming and Qing dynasties,and there is a certain correlation with the temporal-spatial distribution characteristics of the plague in terms of plague’s quantity and regional distribution.Analyzing the writing of plagues in novels from the aspects of plot characteristics and emotional expression,it can be found that plagues play a unique role in novels that cannot be replaced by other types of diseases.The creative ideas of plague plots in Ming and Qing vernacular novels can mainly be divided into three categories: generational accumulation,adaptation of previous works,and individual originality.The first two are based on previous works and mainly reflect the author’s achievements in plot conception and artistic creation.The latter is closely related to the author’s personal experience.Exploring such plague plots can not only reveal the author’s identity and literacy but also help modern readers to further understand the occurrence of plagues in the Ming and Qing dynasties and realize the practical impact of plagues on novel writing.Due to people’s natural fear and resistance to plagues,authors often express negative emotions when using plague writings.This psychology is reflected in character shaping and language rhetoric.Firstly,plagues are used to create undesirable images of characters or contrast the positive images of characters in novels,and language related to them is mostly used to express negative emotions such as self-mockery or cursing.In fact,the writing of the plague illustrates not only the characteristics of the creation of Ming and Qing novelists,but also the life epitome of the people in the Ming and Qing dynasties who lived under the shadow of the plague for many years.While interpreting the plague writing in the novel from a literary point of view,it can be seen that it also reveals the limited understanding of the plague and simple medical concepts of the people that time,records the folk beliefs such as the plague god and the pox god produced by plague,and contains the author’s humanistic concern for manners of the world and hearts of human beings.Although the plague writing in the Ming and Qing vernacular novels presents a large amount and scattered distribution as a whole,the unique characteristics of the plague with rapid onset,strong contagiousness and higher mortality rate than common diseases make it play a unique role in the novel writing.Exploring the interaction between the plague and novel writing can not only understand the impact of the plague on the novel’s creation and people’s lives,but also help people today understand ancients’ wisdom from their coexistence with the plague,and feel the traditional Chinese cultural spirit manifested in the plague writing,so as to draw spiritual strength from it.