Literary Transformation And The Construction Of The National Cultural Identity

With the realisation of the Hebrew Bible's canonization, some related Jewish literary products have been excluded and therefore forms, around The Bible, a group of documents: The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Those, as falling outside the canons, have not been adequately explored. This dissertation, however, regards those as a unity and focuses on their literary transformation as well as their literary fount, from the historical and cultural angles and applying naratological theories and also in a comparative manner with the Hebrew Bible. It is proposed that in the narrative of apocrypha and pseudepigrapha arises a paradoxical literary movement: on one hand, the narrative art degenerates, but on the other, the novelistic culture quietly emerges, behind which as a whole are profound anxieties over the construction of the national cultural identity.The introduction sorts out relative concepts, introducing and evaluating the current conditions and situations of this kind of research within and outside China.Chapter one: the degeneration of the narrative art. This degeneration generally takes place in four aspects: miracle becomes more and more a joint that drives the plot to advance, to which the narration must turn to achieve transition or development; and accordingly, characters fall into a clichéand have lost their profundity;Then the conceptual and informative poetry intervenes, and even inundates the narration, which aims to resist the ambiguity of the narrative; and also, body rhetoric as often used in the Hebrew Bible is gradually eliminated and body experiences are replaced by the law as a new experience and cognitive medium.Chapter two: the rise of novelistic culture. Despite this degeneration, the novel, as a new genre, grows into an outstanding literary current. This phenomenon is discussed in four aspects. Firstly, the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha begin to address"the present", whose texts are closely connected to the progressing present, and therefore they fall back on the exterior, formal integrity, especially orbicular plots to offset the on-going uncompleted present. Secondly, many narrative texts in the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha flash back to the ancestors'stories once and again and thus arouse and reinforce the Jewish...