The Literature Performance Of Female Folklore In Southern Yangtze Region

Female folklore is cultural phenomenon which is gradually formed in the historical development of women, recurring and inheriting from generation to generation. Female folklore in literary works plays a great role in showing the essence of women’s lives, shaping female characters, and deepening the theme of the literary work. This paper integrates female folklore with literature and art study with the help of folklore in literature, making female folk a unique way to interpret literature and build theory. In order to facilitate the exposition, we select literary works of contemporary Southern Yangtze writers with geographical characteristics. The female folklores involved are customs with distinct features or those happened to individual woman externally, internally, physically, mentally, behaviorally and psychologically.Female folklore is a new perspective when looked from the perspective of criticism on female characters in literary works. Culture is the iconic symbol of people, and folk, as the bottom of the culture, affects people’s thoughts and behaviors to some extent. The females, as the object of female literature, have unbreakable connections to folk both in the life and culture perspectives. Folk is the background of different cultures and it reflects women’s inherent and unique characteristics. The females are the incarnation of folk and folk on the other hand is the soul of the females. They integrate in culture and literature. Therefore, from the perspective of female folklore which infiltrated in literature works, we can not only feel those vivid female literary figures full of personality and primitive life force, but also better appreciate and grasp the essence of female culture. This research perspective is unique and groundbreaking.We find that Chinese female literature works essentially lacks words of creation and criticism with local, national, original features in its history for the reason of citing western feminist theory, which is also one the main reasons of variant individualism and desire in contemporary female literature. And the introduction of female folklore will not only undoubtedly highlight the creation and criticism discourse, but also compensate for the inadequacies of cultural research of Chinese female literature to some extent.For this reason, this paper has practical significance and literature value. Inspired by Richard Bauman’ theory in folk performance, we study the literary process of Southern Yangtze female folklore in a creative way by employing literature performance as the key words. We propose that there is a regular, predictable and standard group behavior system or scene in literature performance, which includes the expectations of a community from tradition, ideals, sense of community and arts in daily life. In this sense, this paper selects literature performance as the thread of thought and looks into it in the following chapters such as the scene of the performance, the route of the performance, the process of the performance, the features of the performance, the theory of the performance and the value of the performance.The first chapter starts with Southern Yangtze ecological context of the female folklore performance and interprets the female features, three-dimensional aesthetic characteristics and the female secular ideal respectively from three perspectives, the natural ecological scene of Southern Yangtze, the humane ecological scene of Southern Yangtze, and the language folk scene of Southern Yangtze. Chapter two is devoted to the route of generating of the female folklore performance in three aspects, the incidence theory, the creation theory and the communication theory from the perspective of literature and art writers’creation theory in order to explore the intrinsic motivation of modern Southern Yangtze writers select female folklore as the contents of their artworks. Chapter three is dedicated to the evaluation of the process of the female folklore performance in three dimensions, the folk inspiration of female reading, the folk interpretation of female mentality and the daily life aesthetic of female folklore from the perspectives of the works and reception aesthetics. Chapter four is an important part of this study and it’s about the characteristics of the Southern Yangtze rural and urban female folklore literature performance. It deals with the marriage customs, the birth customs, the folk belief, and the production customs and so on. Besides, this chapter looks into the core of Southern Yangtze female folklore literature from the perspectives of literary prototype and literary narrative mode. Chapter five is also the focus of this study and it focuses on the theoretical construction of Literature Criticism of Female Folklore. This paper attempts to build a multi-dimensional theoretical framework, which is based on the theory of female literary folklore. The integration theory of the female folklore culture and literature, the prototype criticism of femininity and the value of the females as the main part of folk are the three dimensions, which provide theoretical support for the Southern Yangtze female folklore literature performance. Chapter six mainly deals with the contemporary value of the Southern Yangtze female folklore literature performance and the relations between the female folklore and the contemporary Southern Yangtze females by ways of field surveys, interviews, and questionnaires. Besides, this chapter also deals with the long-term influence of female folklore on the development of contemporary literature from the perspective literary history.It is worth noting that although this paper is under the guidance of the theory of folklore in literature, it also involves a wide range of subjects, such as literature, art, folklore, anthropology, women’s studies, psychology, culture, ecology, etc. In addition to the frequently-used research methods in humanities, this paper employs other methods such as field surveys, questionnaires and case interview in particular. We have been to more than ten counties in Southern Yangtze area to research the female folklore images and activities in the works of those Southern Yangtze writers and the geographical and cultural background under which the writers engaged. Besides, we conducted surveys and interviews on more than eighty older and younger women in the Southern Yangtze area. All these enriched this paper with lively female folklore materials.By the influence of consumerism and postmodernism, tendencies of desire, fast food and randomness appear in parts of the contemporary female literature. The flat, conceptual and simple images shaped are far cry from those classic ones in modern literature. The modern Southern Yangtze writers who employ female folklore as the entry point provide inspirations and references for those controversial personal writing and body writing. This entry point is a creative interpretation and integration of folklore, humane and anthropology. Those female images portrayed on this basis are real, original and dynamic. Furthermore, female folklore as the entry point makes the portray of female human nature deeper and pro founder. Folk as the bottom of culture is a basic field of human survival and activities and people in this folk field are more natural, more primitive, and more humane. Female repression is above all humans’, thus to investigate and to express the profound female nature in folk not only conforms the new humane orientation, that is to say, literature is concerned about people, but also corrects the backward tendency, that is to say, body writing, in contemporary female literature.Based on female folklore, the theory of Literature Criticism of Female Folklore provides a new theoretical growth points to the criticism theory of contemporary female literature and promotes the overall prosperity and healthy development of it. Literature Criticism of Female Folklore is human-oriented and features folk. It comes to China with a combination of folklore and anthropology. As a new method of contemporary female literature criticism, it is provided with great significance and practical value in correcting the materialized writing in contemporary female literature.As new theoretical keywords, female folklore and Literature Criticism of Female Folklore not only are contemporary expansion of the proposition literature is about people, but also native innovation of the theory of Chinese female literature criticism. They will inspire the production and criticism of female literature in China in and after the21st century.