On Li Jianwu Plays

Li jianwu is a eminent playwright on the history of Chinese modern drama. he wrote and recomposed over 40 plays including comedies, tragicomedies and legendary plays throughout his life, and made great contributions to the development of modern drama. This dissertation discourses upon the aesthetics of drama, the value of drama, the relation between Li jianwu's plays and the recourses of western plays and traditional opera, and reception history of plays.The preface draws an outline and gives a brief commentary on all of Li jianwu's plays and summarizes several important features, such as pioneering spirit and the lack of definite feature of every stage.The first chapter considers that the humanity viewpoint is the core of Li's aesthetics of drama. This chapter consists of two sections. The first one is to study the particular meaning of the Li's humanity. The second one is to study the value and the defect of the humanity aesthetics. Li's aesthetics of drama provides new literary experiences and literary illusions, and insists the independence of literature against the utilitarianism viewpoint of literature, and his exploring of modern humanity responses the human's literature in Wusi period.The second chapter discourses upon the value and contribution of Li's comedy. It is composed of creating characters, the technique of comedy, and the rhetoric arts of comedy's language. In the end it summarizes Li's contribution to the modern comedy.The third chapter discourses upon the feature and the creation method of the tragicomedy. Firstly it discerns several typical tragicomedy works their types are obscure at present, and analyses their feature of type. Secondly it studies the creation method of psychology-realism method and the relative technique and evaluates the significances.The forth chapter discourses upon the Li's plays' creative absorption to therecourse of western drama and the traditional opera. This chapter consists of three sections. The first on discourses upon the relation between Li's comedies and Moliere's comedies and traditional operas. The second one discourses upon the revolution of modern drama in the legendary drama Fan ma ji. This play is a perfect fruit of creative combination of traditional nan xi and modern drama. The third one summarizes the recomposed play's value and significance of making the foreign classical plays.The fifth chapter discourses upon the reception of Li's drama works. It consists of two sections: Li 's plays' destiny on the drama's stage and the playwright's destiny in the history book of literature.The epilogue discourses upon the summary of Li's plays' value and contribution, playwright's position in the modern drama's history.