Water Margin instance of literary work
Authorship
Since fiction was not at first a prestigious genre in the Chinese literary world, authorship of early novels was not attributed and may be unknowable. The authorship of Water Margin is still in some sense uncertain, and the text in any case derived from many sources and involved many editorial hands. While the novel was traditionally attributed to Shi Nai'an, of whose life nothing is reliably known, recent scholars think that the novel, or portions of it, may have been written or revised by Luo Guanzhong (the author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms). Other contenders include Shi Hui (施惠) and Guo Xun (郭勛).Luo Guanzhong
Some believe that Water Margin was written entirely by Luo Guanzhong. Wang Daokun (汪道昆), who lived during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor in the Ming dynasty, first mentioned in Classification of Water Margin (水滸傳敘) that: "someone with the family name Luo, who was a native of Wuyue (Yue (a reference to the southern China region covering Zhejiang), wrote the 100-chapter novel." Several scholars from the Ming and Qing dynasties, after Wang Daokun's time, also said that Luo was the author of Water Margin. During the early Republican era, Lu Xun and Yu Pingbo suggested that the simplified edition of Water Margin was written by Luo, while the traditional version was by Shi Nai'an.However, Huikang Yesou (惠康野叟) in Shi Yu (識餘) disagree with Wang Daokun's view on the grounds that there were significant differences between Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, therefore these two novels could not have been written by the same person.
Hu Shih felt that the draft of Water Margin was done by Luo Guanzhong, and could have contained the chapters on the outlaws' campaigns against Tian Hu, Wang Qing and Fang La, but not invaders from the Liao dynasty.Another theory states that Luo Guanzhong was from the Southern Song period vice the Ming dynasty. Cheng Muheng (程穆衡) suggested in Notes on Water Margin (水滸傳注略) that Luo lived in the late Southern Song dynasty and early Yuan era. Huang Lin'gen (黃霖根) pointed out that the name of one of the compilers of Anecdotes of Jingkang (靖康稗史) was Nai'an, and suggested that this "Nai'an", who lived during the Southern Song dynasty, was Shi Nai'an. He also felt that Shi wrote a simplified version of Water Margin, which is not the current edition.
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