古代小说学中“传奇”之内涵和指称辨析

Through a critical examination of the connotation and referent of the term chuanqi (legendary story, literally, " transmission of the strange") in the study of fiction in the ancient China, the paper points out that the term chuanqi in the ancient critical discourse was not a concept of genre but a concept of content and thematic type. When chuanqi is referred to as a genre, it was often called as a then homophonic term zhuanji (biographical record), while chuanqi referred to "a book -length account of an event from the beginning to the end. " This term of chuanqi referred to a literary text in the form of a book, which differed from literary sketches in the form of a collection or an anthology. In the orthodox concept, chuanqi was, compared with literary sketches, only " a subsidiary of literary creation," less significant in literary status and value, and the self - consciousness of fictional nature in writing chuanqi stories did not start in the Tang Dynasty but in the Ming Dynasty.