| Narration is a basic skill for human being to survive and develop. It gets continuous progress along with the advancement of human society. Entering in modern times, people showed extreme interest on narration. Scholars began to study on many topics about narration, such as narrative means, narrative media, narrative works and narrative subjects. Step by step, a huge system about narratology was formed.We can see the narrative character of Chinese culture in Pre Qin's historical works, such as ChunQiu, ZuoZhuan, and GuoYu, which were written in 2,500 years ago. After nearly 500 years development, it come into perfect as the Historical Records (ShiJi), the first biographical historical book, was released in Han dynasty. And it got better and better accompany with the development of historiography.Although the narrative tradition of Chinese ancient literature is not as good as Chinese ancient historiography, but people always say that literature and history are in the same family. Many chapters in excellent historical works, such as ZuoZhuan, Shiji, and Hanshu, have been regarded as excellent, outstanding literature writings. Many excellent literary works, such as Romance of Three Kingdom, Three Woman and A Hundred and Five Men, were produced by absorbing the method of writing history books.The biographical historical books are main body of Chinese traditional history books. And biographies often embody the compiler's coordinative pursuit of historiography and literature. The biography in the historical book is outcome of historiography and literature. It's the combination of them. By narratological analysis on historical works, not only can help us to discover the original relationship between historiography and literature, but also can help us to grasp the literary value of historical masterpiece better and understand the historical background of literature. Also it can help us to firm the narratological style of Chinese ancient historical works under the impact of the west narratology, to offer valuable fruit studying on the construction of Chinese traditional narrative theory.Both Tang dynasty and Song dynasty are in the flourishing period of Chinese ancient literature and historiography. Liu Zhiji's Shi Tong that was published in Early Tang dynasty was a hallmark of the development of relationship between Chinese ancient literature and historiography. New Tang History Book, which was published after Shi Tong not long time, had great significance on both literature and historiography. At present, the academe has made great progress when they study on character's life, history event and literary method on New Tang History Book. However, the research about its text from the angel of narration is just as few as stars at dawn. To discuss deeply about the relationship between Chinese ancient literature and history, this thesis take the biography in New Tang History Book as research object to make a systematic study on narrative traits of this history book.Mainly adopting methods of narratology, stylistics and comparative study, this thesis discusses the narrative character of New Tang History Book through analyzing cross-references narration, folk narration and narrative intervention of New Tang History Book. Also it discusses New Tang History Book's unique characteristic of biography's narrative method through comparing biography in New Tang History Book with narrative style in Tang dynasy .This thesis includes Introduction, nine chapters and the Conclusion. The main contents are as follow:The part of Introduction is mainly about the origin, train of thought, object and method of this thesis. It also gives an overview of the peripheral research and narrative research of New Tang History Book by ancient and contemporary scholars.The thesis investigates narrative structure, cross-references narration ,narrative intervention, and folk narration in first six chapters.Chapter 1 is about narrative structure. each one of biographies in New Tang History Book use common techniques of Chinese Official History, which organizes text in order of precedence. However, it also use techniques of narration interspersed with flashbacks and flash back to avoid monotony and tautology, which form diversified character of temporal structure. Under the temporal clue, biographies usually use structures of crossing pearls with one thread and one thread with two branches. During every biography, it uses different method to associate each protagonist to form a huge net of relationship, which make biographies in New Tang History Book present netlike composition.Chapter 2 and 3 is about narrative intervention. Historians'writing history books are not only record important events of every dynasty, but also reveal the consciousness of themselves by narrative intervention. There are relatively distinct pointing intervention and commenting intervention, as well as metaphorical narrative intervention which has writer's judgment in biographies of New Tang History Book. By narrative intervention, Songqi get the effect of using simple text to express abundant meanings, hiding author's mind in connotation, which strengthen the literary characteristics of the biography. Biographies in New History Book shows traditional consciousness of Chinese historian, official character and Songqi's thought.Chapter 4 and 5 is about cross-references narration. Biography is a writing method of history books, which takes characters as it's main body. It intends to observe events by portraying a character, to expatiate history by writing biographies. Portraying a historical people both in figure and spirit is the highest standard which historians stick to pursue. The thesis takes Weizheng and Wuzetian as examples to discuss the function of cross-reference narration's portraying historical characters. The thesis consider that cross-reference text improves the third dimension effect of protagonist's character by the complementarity of protagonist's life story. The cross-reference text provides specific context for protagonist's behavior, opening a window for readers to grasp protagonist's action motivation and state of mine. At the same time, the cross-reference make readers look through protagonist's real appearance to know the real detail text by interpret protagonist's fate. So, readers can know more detail about the protagonist.Chapter 6 is about folk narration. To pursue narration's detail and rich character, historians usually pick folk narration when writing history books. New Tang History Book has picked a great deal of folk narration, which involved wide range. By collecting and recording texts of folk narration, Songqi makes protagonist of each biography get legendary character to realize changing narrative angle and strengthening the width and depth of the reflection on society. It's also an effective way to solve the problem of the tautology about text structure by using experience folk narration to organize texts. To make folk narration adapt the request of official narration, Songqi uses method of imagination, embellishment and processing on texts of folk narration. And texts of folk narration show itself deeply official and obviously elegant character.Chapter 7, 8 and 9 mainly use method of comparative study to compare the biography in New Tang History Book with the biography in Tang literary biography works, Tang epitaph, Tang jotting and Tang Romance on the character of narrative style to discuss the similarities and differences of narrative method between historical biography and literary works.Literary biography, epitaph, and jotting are all important historical origin of biographies in official history. Many contents in biographies of official history are on the basis of addition and transformation of them. Comparing with them, official history pays more attention to maintain and propagate thoughts of upper ruling class. Official history takes true record as its target, which makes it take more attention to be objectivity. Historians'personal emotion express metaphorically. Both literary biography and epitaph not only can make comment on the protagonist's life in the text, but also can express writer's personal emotion. The narrator's subject consciousness is very easy to see. Literary biography and epitaph are usually finished just after the protagonist died by one of his good friends. So, literary biography and epitaph usually slide over sensitive topic. There are usually some kinds of dim text which record the event. However, historical biography takes perspicuity as highest standard. Biographies in official history usually record protagonist's life in summary, paying attention to the protagonist's political metamorphosis. Jotting novels and romance that take realities as subject matter are interested in collecting amusing anecdotes and making scenario vivid and intricate to attract readers. So the writer will use many kinds of techniques to enrich text and create living second nature.On the basis of above parts, the part of conclusion discusses the relation between literature and history, and takes the conclusion that historical narration possesses the factor of literary narration. Historical narration is one of provenances of Chinese literary narration. When literary narration gets great progress after breaking through historical narration, official history which is the representation of historical narration appears some kind of trend of atrophy and decline. However, the pursuit of beauty of narration during writing a history book is still the tradition of historians who abound in literary culture and ideality.
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