| Tang Xianzu who is a great thinker,man of letters,dramatist in Ming Dynasty wrote five dramas his life time,including the "Four Dreams of Linchuan",namely Legends of Purple Hairpin,The Peony Pavilion,The Southern Tributary State,The Handan Dream,and the unfinished The Dream of the Purple Flute.These dramas have laid great influence around the world,because of which the Japanese drama historian Aoki Masaru juxtaposed Tang Xianzu with William Shakespeare in his History of Chinese modern drama(1916),and called them "Two Great Dramatists of East and West".Thus,this paper focuses on Tang's five drama texts,without considering the stage,the light,the acoustics and etc.Drams texts here include their auxiliary words in dialogue,librettos,kejie,inscriptions,and the off-stage poems.These,combined together,constitute an organic unity of narration,which attributes to the restoration of the stage performance somewhat.Narratology,as one of contemporary literary theories,provides a framework of theoretical analysis,a brand new perspective and a critical method for enhancing the study of Chinese narrative texts.Chinese traditional narration has embedded multiple into the texture of drama,and become a new narrative style with Chinese flavor.Tang known as the King of Romance in Ming Dynasty,his five drama texts has been claimed as the climax of Chinese classical drama.Up till now,it is to be noticed that there are few who seldom view Tang's five drama texts as an organic unity of art,and combine Chinese and Western narrotology to do a systematic and comprehensive study of them.Enlightened by this,this paper will introduce Western narrotolgoy,and with that of Chinese theories,produce a systematic study of Tang's five drama texts.Moreover,the paper is going to a deep analysis of the five texts' narration based upon different elements of narration,and attempt to root out the narrative theme,methods and characteristics behind those different texts.The paper consists of six chapters.The first chapter talks about the surface narrative themes and the deep narrative themes of Tang Xianzu's five drama texts.The surface narrative themes can be generalized into "the adventures of love":"separate narration and juxtaposition of love" in The Dream of the Purple Flute;"fission and aggregation of love" in Legends of Purple Hairpin;"the breakthrough and return of love" in The Peony Pavilion;"the spreading and promotion of love" in The Southern Tributary States "fluctuation and disillusion of love" in The Handan Dream.But when taken as a whole,its deep narrative themes can be summarized as "time and life".They profoundly reveals that time erodes women's marital feelings,and time triggers feudal scholars' discredit for their ultimate fate by narration and juxtaposition of different life stages---adolescence and young adulthood,middle age and old age,thus expounding different feelings and states of different life stages as well as philosophical thinking and questioning about time and life.The second chapter discusses the character shaping methods of Tang Xianzu's five drama texts.In these texts could be found six kinds of vivid characterization.From the perspective of Chinese narratology,they flexibly use writing techniques which apply to ancient drama texts,such as "mimesis"""setting-off" and others;and from the western's,pronouns suggested and adhesion,character's conflict under specific situations,multi-perspective of focal characterization,the complicated round characters,and the spatial externalization.The third chapter discusses the narrative strategies,which is full of mutualism of blankness and fullness in Tang Xianzu's drama texts,including the faithfulness of feelings,the rationality of logic,freedom without borders,and permeation of figures in historical facts and the real life,integrating three narrative methods.Tang's mixture of reality,fiction and fable finally comes to that effect,real and fictive,fairy and authentic at the same time.The fourth chapter discusses the "narrative of dreams".In this chapter,"the second narrative of dreams" is treated as the research object mainly in four texts,adopting the perspective of narrative research,combining the theory of Freud's "interpretation of dreams",emphatically analyzing the core issues about its contents and its causes,its combination mechanism,its narrative strategy,levels and narrative function.The fifth chapter discusses Tang's time narration.Four narrative strategies to deepen the narrative theme and start further philosophical speculations are used in those texts,namely time crossing to the effect of realizing pre-narrative of sentiment,time delaying to that of reversing the story,repeated time frequency to solid,transcend and return time,and the comparison of double time to protrude the themes.The sixth chapter discusses the narration based on space.It can be viewed as highlight which surpasses its counterparts.In these five drama texts,there are six space-based narrations,namely geographical space,garden space,dream space,memorial space,image space,and things in space.To conclude,Tang's drama texts are bestowed with deep narrative themes,and brilliant various narrative strategies.The implied author exposes different unique methods of narrative in these five texts,to climb up to the climax of Chinese classical drama. |
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