When Lu Xun wrote his influential Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, 1925), he claimed that fiction in the classical language had reached its apogee with the chuanqi (classical tale) of the Tang. Following the Tang, he maintained, classical fiction had entered a period of long decline while vernacular fiction flourished (Lu Xun only grudgingly accepted the popularity of Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi). As a result, the classical fiction of the Song dynasty and later (with the exception of Liaozhai zhiyi) has been largely ignored by literary scholarship until quite recently. This is of course unfair to the creativity of many authors of classical fiction of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing, as by now has been pointed out repeatedly. It has also resulted in the almost total neglect of the genre of the classical language novella that was cultivated in the fifteenth...
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