Chinese novels

During the sixteenth century, a little before the novel took shape in Western Europe, a very similar form of prose fiction was being developed in China. According to Andrew Plaks, “The significant areas of convergence between what we customarily call the classical novel in China and its namesake in Europe are not confined to one or two points of resemblance – as is perhaps the case when one describes parallels of a similar nature in Tokugawa Japan, for example. Rather, they cover the full range of topics of concern to literary theorists and to historians of the European novel, among these:

the position of the novel within the spectrum of traditional literary genres, the cultural and political implications of vernacular and popular modes of narrative, the roots of the new form in social and cultural history, the triumph of ‘mimetic’ realism and then the gradual deflection of its assumed objective orientation into the dimension of internal subjectivity, the essentially ironic focus of the novel’s characteristic rhetorical stance, and the relation between this inexorable shift to interior selfhood and certain concurrent philosophical trends shaping the intellectual milieu from which the novel sprang.”

Plaks, for instance, points to the social factors that contributed to the rise of the Chinese novel, which closely resemble the social trends of early modern Europe: “Such long-range trends as population shifts to the great cities of the Yangtze Delta region and the rise of urban culture, the conversion to a silver-based money economy, commercialization, commodification, incipient industrialization – even overseas colonization, to name just the most striking factors.”