Study Of National Myths Motif

Mythologies are the cultural treasures in the early stages of mankind. This dissertation focuses its study on the mythologies of the various nationalities in China. Motif, as it is called, is the most natural and basic elements in mythical narration. These elements may exist independently in the various channels of mythology inheritance, and can reappear or recombine in other literary forms or cultural products. Motif, as a particular unit for quantitative and qualitative analyses of the mythologies of various nationalities, has an obvious function of methodology.First of all, this paper clarifies the method of study on the motif, examining the definition, formation of the motif of mythologies and its basic characteristics of being objective, direct, sequential, ambiguous, typical, holy and combinational. By means of differentiating the motif from the concepts of prototype, genre, theme and subject, this paper further standardizes the concept of the motif. Based on this, and in the standard of objectivity and unity, the motifs of ethnical mythologies used in this paper are basically classified into the motif of origin, the motif of the names of gods, the motif of calamity and the motif of sequence and, furthermore, these basic categories are classified according to uniform standard, so as to adapt them to different levels in the analysis of mythologies.The main body of this paper deals with the connotation, generality and particularity, inertia and evolution of ethnical mythologies. Firstly, the motif of mythologies contains very rich substance. Generally speaking, the motif of ethnical mythologies contains not only the history, life and relationship of a nation, but also the national culture and emotion. Many motifs of ethnical mythologies possess the significance of the prototype and are valuable to analyze, and particularly in the analogies and symbolizations of the motif, one can clearly perceive the ideological contents, veiled ideas and tendency...