Study On The Tale Of Gourd In China

Gourd, as a folkloric item with strong national beliefs, had gained attentions from scholars during the Seeking for the Origin of Culture movement in which gourd craze emerged and cooled down in recent years. With the policy of the development and prosperity of culture being proposed, we need arouse the interest in it again, in order to establish the cultural self-confidence and to stimulate our cultural self-consciousness. Tale of gourd, centering on gourd motif, has rooted in Chinese gourd culture with various meanings, distributed around the country and among many nations. It gained its position of garden of Chinese folktale because of its numerous variations and forms. Tale of gourd, on the basis of gourd motif, the variations of gourd culture of, opens a door to study of gourd culture. This thesis applies methods of morphology and type to study texts of Chinese tale of gourd, classifies them according to the functions in the tales, analyzes the features of each classification, summarizes the narrative values, and at the end, interprets the cultural meanings and traces the origin of the motif gourd. In general, the thesis, based on the variations of tale of gourd, analyzes the functions, examines the emergence and variations of gourd culture, which contributes the study on gourd culture, and among which the study on narrative functions supplements the Role Theory in folktale.