ABSTRACT
Chinese readers have long been accustomed to the notion that the canonical text required in terpretation by a recognized author ity. This was particularly the case during the Ming period (13681644), when students of the Confucian classics were required to com m it to memory the version of the classics annotated by the leading Neo-Confucian philosopher, Zhu Xi (1130-1200).1 W hen vernacular texts began to be published in abundance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the venerated tradition of com m entary was applied to em erging vernacular genres and in fluenced the developm ent of a herm eneutics or dushu fa rM I® for Ming vernacular fiction. W estern scholars have dem onstrated that the most influential of the vernacular narratives were refashioned and rein terpreted by m en of letters in line with pre dom inantly Confucian principles or with aesthetic norm s derived from classical culture. This has led to an evaluation of the great vernacular narratives as examples of “literati” (elite) culture which could be com pared with the great novels of the European tradition.
