The Consciousness Of Vitality And The Spirit Of Fatality

This comparative study on the dream plays between Strindberg and Tang Xianzu may claim to be truly original and highly creative, as immediate referential materials are unapproachable and even unavailable: Such researches as have publicized their positive results are not yet seen up to date.This research offers firstly a sweeping survey on the social sources and historical factors underlying the dream-plays of such types, wherewith thematic studies in the analytical comparative sense are unfolded as into the following aspects: the leitmotiv of love and hate, life and death, passion-transcendence embodied in aesthetic concepts, ideological conveyance and views of women and feminineness, conversion and Orientalism, etc..Upon such ground is the analysis of the formal elements which is determined and adjusted by the thematic: the relationship between theme and form has been elucidated and so is the humanistic reflections in dream plays, covering, with a light-touch, the landscape of illusion versus reality, the appearance of absurdity versus the interior rationality, the immaterial imagery of allegory versus the corresponding materialized dramatic structures with philosophical overtones, and so forth.Owing to the shortage, or even the lack, of referential materials, the authoress'individual thinking is bound to be affected by some prevailing critical epithets and also draw on certain commonplace theorizations, exemplified by such stuff as psychoanalyses, the archetype and mythological criticism, structuralistic applications, feminism, Aristotle's poetics, Hegel on tragedy, the death instinct and absurdity in existentialistic sense, and so on, within a infrastructure of the literary theory offered in universities of this country, with no lack of terminological items of Marxist sociology and historicism.