Please correct the grammar mistakes of the following reading response.

The Political Significance of Stones of the Sea

1. Is there political significance in Stones of the Sea?

Stones of the Sea is a typical social novel (世情小说）that embedded with political significance. First of all, the Chinese literal intellectuals like to show their nobility by telling emotions （“言情以明志”）. During the “ten years of studying obscurity” （“十年寒窗”）, the fortune fame （“求败功名”）was their ultimate goal, which motivates them to reflect on the social and political life of the society. Also, the author points out that, in the preface, the “benevolence” and the “passion”. He doesn’t think that the creator is using the “benevolence” to create the world, it is the “passion” that used to create the world. He is challenging the deep-rooted social principle. He starts thinking about the human nature and paying attention to the self-consciousness.

2. Does Stones of the Sea meets Liang Qichao’s criteria for the political fiction?

Stones of the Sea is a tragic love story. The author starts the novel from picturing a time scene, which shows to the readers the dark side of the social life at that times. He reveals the root cause of the tragedy: the custom of “Matchmaker’s words” from Mencius’ philosophy thinking. However, the author is not giving any method or advise to fight with that. There is only “pessimism” （“厌世主义”，“不想活在世上”）. In Liang Qichao’s opinion, fictions should help with diffusing new ideas so that make people to be more open-minded. Stones of the Sea provides a intriguing story. The life of the characters is very close to the real life of the people at that time, thus making the novel easy to spread, so it is supposed to be a good political novel. However, it is not exactly the political novel that Liang Qichao expected because there is no problem-solving solutions for the society.

3. Stones of the Sea and critical realism

According to the ideology of the novel, we can tell that the author was probably influenced by the translated western novels from Lin Shu. For example, there are similar critical realism thinking between Stones of the Sea and the novels like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, etc. The common feature is, as Lin Shu says, they are reporting the social problems to the governors. As for solving the problems, it is what the governors should do.