Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan
| Author | 西周生 ("Scholar of the Western Zhou") anonymous |
|---|---|
| Original title | 醒世姻緣傳 |
| Country | China |
| Language | Chinese |
| Genre | novel of manners |
The Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan (Chinese: 醒世姻緣傳; pinyin: Xǐngshì Yīnyuán Zhuàn; literally: "The Story of a Marital Fate to Awaken the World"), also translated as Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World, Tale of Marriage Destinies That Will Bring Society to Its Senses and A Romance to Awaken the World, is a Chinese classical novel of the late Ming or early Qing dynasty. One recent scholar calls it "one of China's most underrated traditional vernacular novels", a saga of two families, one a reincarnation of the other, whose "catalog of vices and moral decay conjures up the apocalyptic vision of a doomed nation".
Originally named E Yinyuan (惡姻緣, A Cursed Marital Fate), the novel takes the Buddhist doctrine of karma and vipāka as its basic motif.
The novel was published under the pen name Xizhou Sheng (西周生), that is, "Scholar of the Western Zhou", the Golden Age in which Confucius lived. Hu Shih's confident announcement in 1931 of his discovery that it was written by Pu Songling has been "largely discredited". Nothing about the author is known, though authorship has been "wrongly" attributed to Pu. on the grounds that the novel contains many phrases from the Shandong dialect, as does Jin Ping Mei (indeed Jin Ping Mei is quoted in the novel).
The date of composition lies between 1618 and 1681, placing it either in the late Ming or early Qing dynasty. It shares structural features and techniques with the Four Classic Ming Novels, such as the 100-chapter paradigmatic length, which is broken down into ten-chapter units, often punctuated with climactic or prophetic episodes in the ninth and tenth chapters. Other shared features are the careful use of prefiguring and recurrence, use of the devices of oral literature, and highly expressive colloquial style. The author uses crude sexual and scatological expressions, but the scenes of actual sex are comparatively restrained ("As for what transpired after the lamp was blown out, you can use your imagination – there's no need to go into details").
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