Ling Mengchu and Li Yu are all great masters of NiHuaBen. Compared with Feng Menglong’s San Yan, Ling Mengchu’s Liang Pai was more original. It was the first time that NiHuaBen had been assembled to a book. At first, as a new style, NiHuaBen is vi...
Ling Mengchu and Li Yu are all great masters of NiHuaBen. Compared with Feng Menglong’s San Yan, Ling Mengchu’s Liang Pai was more original. It was the first time that NiHuaBen had been assembled to a book. At first, as a new style, NiHuaBen is vigorous but with the time went , it became more and more stiff. Li Yu inherited and reformed the NiHuaBen style moulded by Liang Pai , and made a breakforth of the development of the NiHuaBen.
Because of the influence of history books, many of the former novels of China were objectively transcribe the real people or stories. For writers, the works was only one-dimensional objective world. In Ming dynasty, the first-classical scholars participated in collecting and reorganizing SongYuanNiHuaBen and they simulated its style to write NiHuaBen. The scholars brought their emotions into the works. FengMenglong’s San Yan had made an important stride in injecting writer’s emotion. After this, LingMengchu’s mentalities were showed projecting in Liang Pai. In Ling’s works, the writer’s consciousness and mentality was still expressed unconsciously. LiYu directly inherited and developed LingMengchu’s style and his ideas and should could be seen everywhere in his works. From LingMengchu to LiYu, writer’s emotion in NiHuaBen was developed from projecting to rising.
As far as novel theory was concerned, LingMengchu firstly put forward that writer should write “the rare of mediocrity” (yong chang zhi qi), but his works was contradictory with his theory. It was LiYu who inherited his idea and successfully applied it to writing. LiYu’s works came from real life and he rarely used ghosts to propel his plot. Li regarded “original” as alternative name of “strange” and posed demanding request of the writer.