A Study of Newspeak in "Cutting Lights"

According to the available data, only a dozen books were banned in the Ming Dynasty, which was dwarfed by more than 100 in the Qing Dynasty. Among the few banned books, the collection of legendary novels "Cutting Lights and Newspeak" has attracted much attention from later generations. The author of this book, Qu You, was born in Qiantang (present-day Hangzhou). He lived in the late Yuan Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty, and wrote a lot in his life, but most of them have been lost, and only a few remain, such as Xinhua, Guihua and History. In "Talking about Cutting Lights", Qu You imitates the ancients, proclaims the liberation of personality with stories of ghosts, gods, lust and immortals, and advocates people to pursue a free life without being bound by the secular world. Among them, the famous ones are Biography of the Green Man, The Story of Jin Fengchai, The Story of Teng Muzui's Garden Visit, etc. In the seventh year of the Ming Dynasty (1442), Xin Wei and imperial academy toasted Li Shimin and said five things: "... in recent years, strange things of vulgar Confucianism have appeared, decorated with rootless words, such as" cutting the lights and telling stories ",which are not only recited by frivolous people in the market, but also given up their studies and talked day and night. They will talk about it day and night if it is not prohibited. So the ban was issued, and anyone who saw this book would be burned to death, and anyone who printed, sold or collected this book would be convicted according to the law. Deng Jian Xinhua is regarded by researchers as a work of transition from Tang and Song legends to notes novels in Qing Dynasty. Lu Xun classified it as an "antique school": "Rich friends of the Tang Dynasty copied the legends of the Tang Dynasty and wrote Xinhua in Deng Jian. Although the article is weak, it uses some gorgeous words to describe boudoir, so it is especially popular with the times and there are many imitators. Until it was banned by the court, this trend gradually declined. " (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction) Wang Kun of Amin Dynasty thought that Qu You didn't write "Cutting the Lantern Newspeak", but that he accidentally got the manuscript, tampered with it and took it as his own (Garden Miscellanies, Volume 5). However, Wang Kun also heard it from others. He didn't research it himself, and his credibility was greatly reduced.