The Journey to the West is the first romantic novel with chapters and sections in ancient China. There are hundreds of The Journey to the West published in Ming Dynasty, and there is no author's signature. The writer is Wu Cheng'en in Ming Dynasty.
The book mainly describes the story of the Monkey King's encounter with Tang Priest, Pig Bajie, Friar Sand, and Bai Nao Tiangong after his birth. He went west to learn the scriptures, and went through difficulties and obstacles along the way, exorcising demons, and after eighty-one difficulties, he finally arrived in the Western Heaven to see the Buddha, and finally the Five Saints passed away. Based on the historical event of "Xuanzang learning from the scriptures", the novel deeply depicts the social reality of the Ming Dynasty through the author's artistic processing.
The important influence of The Journey to the West;
1, domestic influence:
The appearance of The Journey to the West opened up a new category of ghost novels. The ingenious combination of well-meaning satire, bitter satire and serious criticism in the book directly affects the development of satirical novels. So The Journey to the West is the pinnacle of ancient romance novels. In the history of world literature, it is also a masterpiece of romanticism and a pioneer of magical realism.
The Journey to the West had a great influence on the creation of ghost novels in later generations. At the end of Ming Dynasty, some people wrote Continued Journey to the West and After Journey to the West, which roughly imitated The Journey to the West's content. In addition, Yang's The Journey to the West and Zhu's Journey to the West in Tang Sanzang are also directly related to The Journey to the West. At the end of Ming Dynasty, Dong Shuo wrote The Journey to the West sixteen times, with its own content and plot, and its style of writing was quite distinctive.
2. International influence:
According to preliminary statistics, there are many versions in The Journey to the West, such as Japanese, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Romanian, Korean, Vietnamese, Polish, Hungarian, Esperanto, etc. There are at most about 30 Japanese versions. Overseas people attach great importance to The Journey to the West's research, and discuss it from the aspects of subject matter, historical background, book writing process, language features, edition origin and so on, and give high praise to his works. A large number of facts show that the westward journey culture has gone beyond the scope of the work itself and China, and moved towards the world.
Reference to the above content: Baidu Encyclopedia-Journey to the West