In old China, the word “xiaoshuo 小説” was a name for the writings which were considered as unreliable quasi-history.On the other hand, however, it was the xiaoshuo that had served as the negative definition of the legitimate history, since the factuality could not be the ultimate criterion of historicity.History could keep its orthodoxy only by degrading xiaoshuo and separating it from history.Later, xiaoshuo also meant all the vernacular stories, oral and written, but its heterodox position never changed.At the end of the nineteenth century, when foreign novels were introduced to China and also were called xiaoshuo, xiaoshuo was reconsidered and dignified as literature.Suddenly xiaoshuo was regarded, not as a false history but as an imaginative fiction.The author studies Lu Xun's 魯迅 Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue 中国小説史略 (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction), the first history of xiaoshuo written in Chinese, as a good illustration of the peculiar situation of xiaoshuo, and questions the boundary of history and fiction.Lu Xun constitutes a history of xiaoshuo by dividing zhiguai 志怪 and chuanqi 伝奇, finding out the advance from former to latter, that is, from the record of fact to creation, from ghost stories to human stories, from usefullness to pleasure.But his following description itself seems to ignore and sometimes contradict what he has stated.Though he tries to detach xiaoshuo from history, he can never succeed.And that very failure shows us the homogeneity of xiaoshuo and history as narration.
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