| As an essential kind of tiger tales in ancient China, the transformable type has a large amount of variant sub-types. It is based on solid historic foundation and cultural accumulation. It serves as a part and a carrier of Chinese tiger worship, tiger myth and tiger culture, so it has research values in many aspect such as literature, esthetics, folklore and ethnology. Nowadays, many scholars have noticed and studied the status and essentiality of tiger culture in Chinese culture history, and have achieved some notable results. However, these researches are almost based on anthropology or folklore, so they hardly deal with tiger tales from literary or esthetical angles, which leaves a gap in such researches on texts of transformable-tiger type. This paper will start with the texts of transformable-tiger type in ancient Chinese documents and focus on such tales in the Tang Dynasty to analyze its theme, to explain its cultural backgrounds and folk customs, and to display its aesthetic feature and creative intention with myth-archetype criticism and structuralism, which will show the style and features of fictions in the Tang Dynasty somehow.This paper has seven parts altogether. Introduction: discuss the tiger image in ancient China Part Two: analyze its themes and evolvement to display its inner connection with religion, ethic and folk psychology. Part Three: explain its cultural backgrounds such as totem, equality, nemesis, animism, to show its contributing factors and characteristics. Part Four, define and explain its four motifs. Part Five: study the tiger-maiden tale by myth-archetype criticism and structuralism. Conclusion. |
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