The Pilgrim's Progress And The Pilgrimage West: A Histori-Typological Interpretation

As one of the most powerful works respectively in the histories of English and Chinese literary, and produced in different times with strikingly different national identities and linguistic qualities, The Pilgrim's Progress and The Pilgrimage West (Xiyou-ji) each show glaring similarities in forms of themes, subject matters, narrative models, the idea of redemption and atonement and the structure of plot.This thesis briefly summarizes the typological epitomes and the present conditions of the studies of this topic, analyses emphatically the similarities in such respects as the subject matter of travel, the theme of pilgrimage, ideas of atonement, beliefs in the Divine Kingdom and the Heavenly Empire and their critical spirits, and endeavors to unveil the historical modifications, the social conditions and the cultural ambience, and hold conclusively that as literary works of"type-changing"at the turning point of socio-political structures, they display similarities of various kinds in accordance with the socio-historical laws as well as the regulating patterns of literature perse.The author also devotes considerable space to the differences and similarities in their narrative modeling: The Pilgrim's Progress adopts the"free wandering structure"or"a string of beads", which echoes the stylistic fashion of European adventure-novels from the Renaissance to the 18th Century. Although this is not typical of classical Chinese literature, Pilgrimage West is exceptionally inclined toward the dominating features of narrating in Europe, and thus further confirms the identical relationship between these two works in the typological respect of narratology.The thesis adopts a new viewpoint of typology, provides rather a comprehensive study of the above-mentioned topic, and in a way, has expanded the space for thinking, and in a sense, may serve as compliment to the present research which remains...