Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber are most commonly grouped as the Four Great Classic Novels.Another term used is Classical Novels.
Chinese fiction, rooted in narrative classics such as A New Account of the Tales of the World, Soushen Ji, Wenyuan Yinghua, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang, Taiping Guangji and official histories, developed into the novel as early as the Song dynasty. The novel as an extended prose narrative that realistically creates a believable world evolved in China and in Europe from the 14th to 18th centuries, though a little earlier in China. Chinese audiences were more interested in history and were more historically minded. They appreciated relative optimism, moral humanism, and relative emphasis on collective behavior and the welfare of the society.
The rise of a money economy and urbanization under the Song Dynasty led to a professionalization of entertainment which was further encouraged by the spread of printing, the rise of literacy, and education. In both China and Western Europe, the novel gradually became more autobiographical and serious in exploration of social, moral, and philosophical problems. Chinese fiction of the late Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty was varied, self-conscious, and experimental. In China, however, there was no counterpart to the 19th-century European explosion of novels. The novels of the Ming and early Qing dynasties represented a pinnacle of classic Chinese fiction.
The scholar and literary critic Andrew H. Plaks argues that Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West as well as Jin Ping Mei (not considered one of the four classic novels but discussed by him as one of the four masterworks of the Ming dynasty) collectively constituted a technical breakthrough reflecting new cultural values and intellectual concerns. Their educated editors, authors, and commentators used the narrative conventions developed from earlier storytellers, such as the episodic structure, interspersed songs and folk sayings, or speaking directly to the reader, but they fashioned self-consciously ironic narratives whose seeming familiarity camouflaged a Neo-Confucian moral critique of late Ming decadence. Plaks explores the textual history of the novels (all published after their author's deaths, usually anonymously) and how the ironic and satirical devices of these novels paved the way for the great novels of the 18th century.
Plaks further shows these Ming novels share formal characteristics. They almost all contain more than 100 chapters; are divided into ten-chapter narrative blocks, each broken into two- to three-chapter episodes; are arranged in symmetrical halves; and arrange their events in patterns that follow seasons and geography. They manipulated the conventions of popular storytelling in an ironic way in order to go against the surface meanings of the story. Three Kingdoms, he argues, presents a contrast between the ideal—that is, dynastic order—and the reality of political collapse and near-anarchy; Water Margin likewise presents heroic stories from the popular tradition in a way that exposes the heroism as brutal and selfish; Journey to the West is an outwardly serious spiritual quest undercut by comic and sometimes bawdy tone. Jin Ping Mei is the clearest and most sophisticated example: the action is sometimes grossly sexual, but in the end emphasizes conventional morality.
