源流·文体·文采:“唐人传奇”地位提升之途径

Origin,Style and Literary Grace:The Way to Improve the Status of Tang Chuanqi

从《太平广记》中“杂传记”之归类,到小说界革命时“诲淫诲盗”的嫌疑,“唐人传奇”长期不被主流认可,却在现代学界享有极高赞誉。疏理晚清民国时期“唐人传奇”地位提升的历史过程,可知这一变化主要通过三条途径实现:第一为源流,“唐人传奇”作为戏曲近源进入学术研究层面,规避了白话长篇被视为小说正格时的冷遇;第二为文体,郑振铎将胡适引介的“short story”概念进行本土化改造,判定“唐人传奇”属于“广义的短篇小说”,使其共享“短篇小说”的高级地位;第三为文采,《聊斋志异》凭借自身审美价值与寓言式批评广受好评,惠及了其文采师法对象“唐人传奇”。这三条途径在“唐人传奇”专人专门研究之外,促进了其小说史地位的提升,也体现出清末民国时期学术语境的整体性西化。

From the classification of miscellaneous biographies in Taiping Guangji to the suspicion of instructing prostitution and stealing during the revolution in the novel world,Tang Chuanqi(literally,transmission of the strange in Tang Dynasty)has not been recognized by the mainstream for a long time,but it enjoys high praise in modern academic circles.Clearing up the historical process of the rise of the status of Tang Chuanqi during the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China,we can see that this change was achieved mainly through three ways.The first way called origin.Tang Chuanqi entered the academic research level as a near source of opera,avoiding the vernacular long being regarded as a novel.The second way called style.Zheng Zhenduo localized the concept of short story introduced by Hu Shi,and determined that Tang Chuanqi belonged to short stories in a broad sense,so that they shared the high-level status of short stories.The third way called literary grace.Strange Tales from a Liaozhai has been widely praised for its aesthetic value and allegorical criticism,and benefited the Tang Chuanqi,its rhetorical teacher.These three ways,in addition to the specialized research of Tang Chuanqi,have promoted its position in the history of fiction,and also demonstrated the overall westernization of the academic context during the late Qing and Republic of China periods.