When reading, there is a language compulsory question - who are the authors of the four famous works, and this question has a standard answer in the current textbook, so now we can answer it without thinking.
However, in the academic community, in addition to the author of the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" Luo Guanzhong basically has no objections, the authors of the other three parts, more or less controversial, such as "Dream of the Red Chamber", there are many modern red experts on whether the author is Cao Xueqin or not, about the author of "Water Margin", there are also Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong co-authored the statement, but the most controversial of them is "Journey to the West".
Journey
The author of "Journey to the West", we all know that it is Wu Cheng'en, but in the Qing Dynasty, there are very few people who know Wu Cheng'en, and the most mainstream theory is that the author of the Journey to the West is the famous Changchun Zhenren Qiu Chu Ji in the Yuan Dynasty, speaking of this Qiu Chu Ji, many people know about him because of Jin Yong's legend of the archery hero, of course, Qiu Chu Ji is indeed a real Taoist celebrity in history.
Qiu Chuji is the author of the journey to the west, appeared in the Shunzhi period of the Qing Dynasty, how a Taoist became the author of the Journey to the West, this will be said later, first to see how the work "Journey to the West" was born.
In fact, as early as the Yuan Dynasty, the story of "Journey to the West" has been widely circulated in the folk, but at that time it was some scattered legends, did not form a complete novel publication, the first time a complete paper novel really appeared was in the 20th year of the Ming Dynasty, that is, in 1592 AD.
At that time, there was a bookstore called Shidetang in Nanjing, which not only sold books but also bought the copyright of various novels for printing and distribution, which was roughly equivalent to a modern publishing house, and in the twenty years of Wanli, this Shidetang published a batch of "Journey to the West", which soon became a bestseller at that time.
However, this ShiDe Tang version of Journey to the West, there is no signature, but in the preface to the beginning of the volume vaguely introduced the origin of this novel, Shi De Tang said that he did not know who the author was when it was published, it may be from a certain royal palace, it may also be written by a person or a jinshi, anyway, the author who wrote this book is certainly not a simple character.
With the best-selling of Journey to the West, everyone began to be more and more curious about this author, and after many people's research, it was believed that the author of this Journey to the West must be from a big man in a royal palace.
Because in order to write such a good work, first of all, there must be literary style, a knowledgeable talent, and secondly, there must be experience in Shilin, otherwise you can't write those innuendos in the novel.
Since this novel has been a great success and response since it was published, why didn't this author come forward and say that I wrote it? This is related to the atmosphere of the literary world at that time, the literati of that era, with the elegance of poetry, wrote this kind of novel to entertain the people, which was regarded as an unpopular carving and insect skill, so if the author who wrote Journey to the West was really a person with an identity, he absolutely did not dare to publicly sign his name to say that he wrote it himself, so no one has ever stood up and admitted that he is the author.
The time soon came to the Qing Dynasty, during the Shunzhi period, a Taoist monk named Remnant Dream Daoist published his research results, saying that the author of Journey to the West, after his research, should be the Qiu Zhiji of our Taoism. The name of this dream-dwelling Daoist was Wang Xiangxu, and he was a very famous person in the field of Taoism at that time, so his evidence was that Qiu Chuji had been invited by Genghis Khan to lead his disciples to the Western Regions, and there was a lot of content about Taoism in journey to the West.
Hill machine
Qiu Chuji is the author of journey to the west, which has been supported by many scholars in the Qing Dynasty, so in the Qing Dynasty, if children take the exam to test the author of Journey to the West, it is necessary to fill in the hill to be the correct answer, of course, in the Qing Dynasty, there were also scholars who questioned this statement.
For example, the famous Ji Xiaolan found a relatively strong evidence to refute, he said: In the Journey to the West, there are many depictions of Jinyiwei and Si Lijian, Si Lijian and Jinyiwei only exist in the Ming Dynasty, and Qiu Zhiji is a Yuan Dynasty person, how can he write about the Ming Dynasty? So in the late Qing Dynasty, the idea that Qiu Wasji was the author of Journey to the West also began to falter.
The first time the author appeared was Wu Cheng'en, in the Qianlong period, there was an archaeologist named Wu Yuyi in Huai'an, Jiangsu Province, when he was sorting out the huai'an county chronicle, he accidentally saw the above record that Wu Cheng'en wrote a book of journey to the west. Wu Cheng'en was a native of Huai'an, so the Huai'an County Chronicle has a record of local people with a certain reputation in history, and Wu Cheng'en's view that he was the author of the journey to the west was soon supported by many Huai'an officials in the imperial court, and Wu Cheng'en's theory gradually became huge.
However, to say that Wu Cheng'en was the author of the journey to the west, in addition to the records of Huai'an County, there is no other ironclad support, which belongs to a very fragile view, so throughout the Qing Dynasty, Wu Cheng'en's claim that he was the author was not recognized, and by the late Qing Dynasty, even a hundred years ago, the name Wu Cheng'en was still unknown. But when it came to the Republic of China, Wu Cheng'en's theory was supported by Hu Shi and Lu Xun, and the influence of Hu Shi and Lu Xun was too great, and the statement of the two of them could almost be said to be a final word, and since then Wu Cheng'en's writing of Journey to the West has become the standard answer.
Then, after the 1970s and 1980s, the academic community began to freely discuss the dispute over the authorship of Journey to the West, and some scholars proposed that the author was Li Chunfang, the first assistant of the Ming Dynasty cabinet, and put forward some reasoning evidence, but it was not enough to overturn Wu Cheng'en's theory, so to this day, the copyright of Journey to the West still belongs to Wu Cheng'en.