A study of the relationship between the prosperity of literary novels and the prevalence of the imperial examination system in the Ming Dynasty based on the LDA model

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we first determine the coupled linkage analysis model of the Ming dynasty imperial examination system and novel literary prosperity, extract the links between potential themes from a large-scale corpus, and mine the probability distribution of lexical items. Then the method of calculating the similarity of thematic coupling is investigated, using the co-occurrence information of lexical items to calculate the association weights, inline, outline and coupling relationships among lexical items, semantic information and relevance of lexical items. Then the historical evolution of the imperial examination system and its position in history are explored. Finally, based on the model mining algorithm, the relationship between the imperial examination system and the prosperity of literary novels is analyzed in terms of the drawbacks of the imperial examination system in the Ming Dynasty, the impact of the imperial examination on the richness of novels and the number of novels. Regarding the influence of novel richness, the criticism of the imperial examination system reached 44% in the early Ming Dynasty, 52% in the middle, and 60% in the late Ming Dynasty. Novels on themes such as magic, immortality, and the grotesque reached 50% in the early Ming Dynasty, 55% in the middle, and 59% in the late. In terms of the number of literary novels, the number of novels written during the Jianwen period was 504, and the number of novels written by those who failed the imperial examinations was 322, with a large number of literati who failed the imperial examinations devoting themselves to literary creation. The system of taking scholars from the eight examinations in the Ming Dynasty promoted the prosperity of literary novel creation.