Between Politics And Art

Guo Moruo can not be ignored in modern literature. Guo Moruo’s achievement includes poetry, novels, drama, prose and essays, including the most famous poetry and drama. The play “Peacock Gall” is unique both in content and ideas. Guo Moruo created “Peacock Gall” in 1942, which described a sad story that in yuan dynasty, a princess named A Gai fell in love with Duan gong, but they were killed by the prime minister and her mother in the end. Readers accept the play in different aspects at different times. The article would analysis the phenomenon with Reception Aesthetics. It will put the text into the whole literary activities to explore the play interpretation of different readers in different times, which can more fully grasp the text meaning and characteristics. The article is divided into three parts according to the time sequence. It will point out that readers are focusing on different aspects between politics and art and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of every period evaluation to point out lessons and meaning to future generations and other literary works. The first part: the reception on 40 s and 50 s of last century. During this period, readers analyzed the play and performance. Performance evaluation was mostly stage effect and the moving plot. Text interpretation was mostly political evaluation during to the influence of social environment, especially the patriotism and criticizing. The artistic evaluation was very few and was dispersed in political evaluation to service for the theme, which had no independent status. The second part: the reception from 60 s to early 80 s of last century. During this period, the social environment had changed and foreign literary theory was introduced into China. But the play evaluation still focused on politics, especially the patriotism and criticizing compromise theme. Political evaluation was repeated. There was little value. Arts were much more than before, but it still had not enough attention. In general, the play was still given to priority to political theme evaluation. The third part: after the mid 1980 s acceptance. During this period, the status of subject evaluation was dropped. It mixed of old and new ideas. There were both national unity ideas and humanitarian ideas. Art evaluation significantly increased, occupying the main position. Many western theories were introduced to dig deep connotation of the works. These ideas were new. But there were still some readers just seek new things and caused song problems that the theory was not in according with the content. At the end, the article will put forward deficiencies in reader’s evaluation in different stages and personal opinion. Reading research results can be found that the research of “Peacock Gall” still has perfect places: First, in general, the valuation of art and ideas are completely separate; Second, there is no attention to the characteristic of drama; Third, there is no link between the play and Guo Moruo’s other works; Forth, literature is not fully adsorbing the existing research results and there are no focus on readers’ reception.