Narrative Strategies In Historical TV Plays In The Eyes Of Mass Culture

It is a common practice for traditional scholars to explore and study TV plays by means of impressive criticism from the perspective of political sociology. The narrative theories in the West, which focus on the text itself, are highly applicable to the analysis of the narrative structures and related laws.Different from such practice, this dissertation starts from the unique "aesthetic dimension" of modern mass culture, attempting to analyze the classical TV play Yong Zheng Dynasty by employing the narrative theories. By analyzing the historical TV play Yong Zheng Dynasty in terms of narrating time, narrating voice, narrating structure and role designing, this study extracts and summarizes some basic narrating models of historical TV plays with a view to exploring the ideological features of historical TV plays. Such case study provides a possible theoretical guidance of fast destructing the story structures, grasping the narrating models as a whole and properly adjusting the story effects for the future production and appreciation of historical TV plays.After defining some related main concepts, this dissertation traced the development of historical TV plays in China. Based on the early development of Chinese TV plays, historical TV plays began to develop since the 1980s and came to the mature stage in the middle of the 1990s. During the initial development stage, the historical TV plays have presented colorful artistic features, among which appeared an important artistic branch — "dramatized edition". Later on, historical TV plays develops further in a more mature way along its own line.After briefly reviewing the development history of narratology at home and abroad, this dissertation elaborates on the historical TV play Yong Zheng Dynasty from the following aspects: in the aspect of narrating time, the historical TV play Yong Zheng Dynasty adopts the linear narrating order, with focus on chronological order and few flashback narrating as a complement. Mainly using the elliptical narrating means, the whole play takes quick-paced narrating time span. For example, the narrating pace of "Managing the Government" is more coherent than that of "Vying for the Throne". The narrating frequency of the whole play is to "narrate one incident that only takes place once". In the aspect of narrating voice, the whole play presents vigorous and compound voice, revealing the authoritative discourse system. The guiding intention is very clear, but the purpose of interference is not achieved by an obvious preaching instruction when life and emotions are taken into consideration. Itsnarrating structures are designed in an obvious story model of "Heroes Tested", revealing the obvious emperor complex of folk stories. As for its role designing, it is not balanced, with preference to the role of heroes. In conclusion, it is to analyze the marketing effect of the historical play Yong Zheng Dynasty, exploring its implied ideological echoes and disclosing the truth of invented worshiping "emperor hero". Thus, a bird's view of some related arguments and opinions of the historical TV plays is presented as concluding remarks.