그들이 범죄소설을 읽은 까닭은? : 공안소설과 명청시기 중국의 법률문화

Why Did They Read Crime Fiction?: Gong'an Collections and Legal Culture in Late Imperial China

What I intend to do in this paper is to search for an answer to the question “why they (those ordinary readers in late imperial China) did read a crime fiction called gong'an.” Assessing the literary values of this unique genre of Chinese crime fiction within the modern system of a linear literary history, however, may not be the right way to find that answer. The very historical context in which the Ming-Qing gong'an collections were reproduced, circulated, and consumed has often been neglected in the previous studies of Chinese literary history, or in a comparative study of the modern detective novel. What we should reconstruct in the study of gong'an collections is not the linear course of evolution of the genre, but the genealogy of the genre: that is, a cultural history beyond the boundaries of the genre. From this point of view, what calls for our attention is the fact that a great variety of genres related to the law, aiming at different classes of consumers, were produced in Ming-Qing society, which was filled with a social, cultural desire for narrativizing the law. We should realize the limitations of reading a genre of gong'an in terms of literary standards without reconsidering the historical context that gong'an was a product of a kind of “litigious society. In fact, a genre of gong'an should be taken as a law story whose affinities with a wide variety of legal literature from case history to secret texts for pettifoggers should also be reconsidered. In this sense, my main attempt in this paper is to read a genre of gong'an as a law story and to reconstruct a genealogy of the genre. To do so, firstly I will examine the Ming-Qing legal system and legal culture, and secondly focus on the genres of legal literature associated with gong'an: in particular, secret texts for pettifoggers. Lastly, I will focus on one of the Ming-Qing gong'an collections as a prominent example that illustrates a strong tendency for a law story.