The Study Of The Chinese Mythology Academic Trends Of Thoughts In The First Half Of The20th Century

In the first half of the20th century (1903-1949), our country’s modern mythology had built up. The mythology had three stages:germination, foundation and expansion, the mythology of China had scratched the form with many predecessors’efforts. Chinese mythology theory was benefited from the introduction of western theories, under the influence of western theories; senior scholars combined with Chinese traditional academic methods which endue Chinese mythology a forceful local and national character since it had born. In this process, the academic trends of thoughts attract generations of scholars from various aspects of Chinese mythology and discovery.The purpose of this paper is to research the first half of the20th century mythology in the field of the academic trend, combine the perspective of a special Chinese mythology in the first50years of academic history, to make the Chinese mythology history has a more comprehensive understanding. There were some scholars said that the Chinese mythology had two thoughts throughout the study, which were the myth of anthropological theories and methods in the west and China local literature texts. This opinion absolutely is reasonable, but still too simple; it doesn’t match the status of the century Chinese mythology perfectly. At that time, there were lots of thoughts had amalgamated, the most obvious were the thoughts of anthropological myth theories and the dialectical of history and myth from historical school. Chinese scholars had benefitted from some foreign scholar like Andrew Lang to use the anthropological theories. And in the area of historical studying, in one hand was the trend of suspecting ancient history named "discernment of ancient history" which led from Gu Jiegang. In other hand, Xu Xusheng had made the criticize and rethink of the extreme "discernment of ancient history". Besides, there were other thoughts obviously in this time, like the texts studying transformed to the field work of the mythology, and the subject of the study had changed from Han to the minority. The last part of the thoughts is the most obvious and also ignored thoughts about the system construction of Chinese mythology which many scholars had made great efforts to. In this paper, we will have these four academic trends of thoughts to introduce, and to grasp the skeleton of the mythology better.