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1 INTRODUCTION Theory of Fiction: A Chinese Perspective I N T ER N AT I O N A LI Z AT I O N O F C H I N ES E F I C T I O N Fiction is a slippery term that people have taken for granted for centuries across cultures. This is so not just for ordinary readers but also for fiction scholars. Terry Eagleton astutely observes that scholars may have been studying prose fiction for years, but “they never seem to have paused to ask themselves what prose fiction actually is. It would be like caring for an animal for years without having a clue whether it is a badger, a rabbit or a deformed mongoose.”1 But one thing is certain: fiction is a transcultural phenomenon. As a literary category, fiction evolved from storytelling in high antiquity. Since we know of no culture that has not a narrative tradition of stories, it is reasonable to hold as true such a claim as: “Nothing seems more natural and universal to human beings than telling stories.”2 Being universal, fiction as a form of narrative is transcultural and international. As Roland Barthes puts it, “Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.”3 When people in high antiquity began to discuss the nature and forms of fiction and make judgments about ways of telling stories, fiction criticism and theory came into being. If fiction as a verbal art is transcultural, do fictions from different cultures have similar origins, follow similar patterns of historical development, employ similar narrative modes and techniques, and display similar characteristic features? In fiction criticism and theory, do people from different cultural traditions share similar notions about fiction’s genesis, nature, function, and ontological condition, and hold similar assumptions and attitudes in their reading and writing of fiction? These are the major concerns of this book. My study, however, is not a general inquiry into these concerns through a conceptual study of data collected from different literary traditions. It is a comparative study of fiction 2 CHINESE THEORIES OF FICTION theory using analytic and critical data from the Chinese tradition in the general context of international fiction studies. I have chosen this subject of inquiry and adopted this approach for a number of reasons. First, despite the fact that Chinese fiction is currently a hot subject for scholars of Chinese and comparative literature and there have been numerous studies of it, studies of fiction theory are almost nonexistent. There are, of course, some excellent studies of the art and narrative theory of Chinese fiction (xiaoshuo) in Chinese and English.4 But their subject of inquiry is confined to methodologies of reading or “narrative”(xushi) defined in the broadest sense, which covers all discursive materials and does not focus on “fiction” as a literary and aesthetic category. Moreover, they are, with the exception of Andrew Plaks’s seminal essays,5 historically oriented and not conceptually concerned with the ontological and epistemological conditions of fiction. Second, except for haphazard remarks and random comparisons, there has been, so far, no book-length study in English that attempts to study Chinese fiction theory from the comparative perspective. Third, there is so far not a single book-length study in English that has as its objective the construction of a Chinese system of fiction theory in the larger context of the internationalization of fiction. A similar situation exists in China. There are numerous histories of Chinese fiction and even a few studies of fiction theory and fiction aesthetics, but there is not a single study that aims at formulating a Chinese system of fiction theory.6 Last but not least, I am concerned with two tendencies in the field of Chinese fiction studies. One emphasizes the unique nature of traditional Chinese fiction and considers fiction theory arising therefrom as something that must be evaluated using Chinese standards. The other, using Western fiction theory as the yardstick, implicitly views characteristic features of Chinese fiction as anomalies or even limitations. Ostensibly, the two tendencies differ, but in essence they share a commonality: both imply that Chinese fiction and its theory are difficult, if not impossible, to internationalize. I admit that Chinese fiction and fiction theory do possess some idiosyncratic features not found in Western fiction. For example, contrary to the Western view of fiction as arising from epic and...

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