This book explores poems, novels, legends, operas and other genres of writing from the Ming Dynasty. It is composed of two parts: the literary history; and comprehensive reference materials based on the compilation of several chronologies.By studying individual literary works, the book analyzes the basic laws of the development of literature during the Ming Dynasty, and explores the influences of people, time, and place on literature from a sociological perspective. In turn, it conducts a contrastive analysis of Chinese and Western literature, based on similar works from the same literary...