On the Evolution of Stylistic Concept of Chinese Novels

The stylistic concept of Chinese fiction has been developing from one to two and then to four types from ancient times to nowadays. Ancient Chinese people took short-story (“笔记”) fiction as the orthodox style of fiction, while romances (“传奇”) and historical novels (“演义”) were regarded as variants. At the beginning of the 20th century, the status of novels with chapters (“章回体”) increased gradually, which divided fiction into two types: short-story fiction and chaptered fiction, but this situation was broken shortly afterwards. Since the 1920s, romances and novels (“话本”) besed on story-teller’s script have gradually separated from short-story fiction and chaptered fiction, and the classifying mode of “short-story fiction, romances, novels besed on story-teller’s script and chaptered fiction” has been spreading widely until nowadays.