The Scholar and the State: Fiction as Political Discourse in Late Imperial China

摘要

After exploring the development of the vernacular language in the Ming-dynasty novel Outlaws of the Marsh in his first book, Ge Liangyan turns to an equally ambitious topic in his second, the relationship between scholarly elite and imperial state in late-imperial fiction. Specifically Ge argues that, as an ever more powerful and autocratic state increasingly encroached on a gradually more disenfranchised and disillusioned literary elite, the vernacular novel came to serve as the most powerful literary expression of political dissatisfaction, a harbinger of the eventual dissolution of the traditional relationship between scholar and state, and the early messenger of the modern age.