A Critical Study of Journey to the West
Published in 1923, this pioneering work of modern scholarship by Hu Shih first proposed the authorship of Wu Cheng'en and the theory that the novel was written as a playful allegory.
A Critical Study of Journey to the West is the seminal work of Journey to the West research and one of the most influential pieces in the history of modern Chinese scholarship. It was compiled by Hu Shih from two earlier drafts: the first, titled "Preface to Journey to the West," was written in December 1921 and published in the Asia East Library Gazette; the second, also titled A Critical Study of Journey to the West, was written in July 1922 and published in the sixth issue of the Reading Magazine of the Effort Weekly. In 1923, when the Asia East Library in Shanghai released a new punctuated edition of Journey to the West edited by Wang Yuanfang, Hu Shih merged and revised these two drafts into a long essay titled A Critical Study of Journey to the West and placed it at the beginning of the volumes. The standalone edition was later included in the second volume of the Collected Works of Hu Shih (first published by Asia East Library in November 1924). The work's two most significant academic contributions are as follows: first, using materials transcribed by Lu Xun (Zhou Yucai) from the Gazetteer of Huai'an Prefecture: Records of Arts and Literature, the Ding Yan Long Compilation, and Ruan Kuisheng's Idle Talk over Tea, he demonstrated that Wu Cheng'en, a government student from Huai'an during the Jiajing era, was the author of the hundred-chapter edition of Journey to the West, thereby ending the long-standing consensus since the Qing dynasty that the work was falsely attributed to the "Perfected Master Qiu Chuji of Changchun." Second, he pioneered the "Playful Theory" of Journey to the West—arguing that the book is a "highly entertaining comic novel and mythological tale," and that there is no need to seek hidden meanings of internal alchemy in the style of the "Great Way's Subtle Words." In doing so, he opposed the tendencies of Qing scholars such as Chen Shibin and Zhang Shushen to interpret the book through the lens of Song-Ming studies of mind and nature or the doctrines of alchemy. Hu's theory, complementing Lu Xun's A Brief History of Chinese Fiction from the same period, established the mainstream discourse of Journey to the West studies in the first half of the twentieth century.