Research On Narration In Strange Stories From A Scholar's Studio

Strange Stories from a Scholar's Studio took place in the period of the highly-advanced critical theory and the various stylistic forms of novels referring to each other in the art of narration. Pu-Songling inherited the excellent tradition of the art in classical Chinese novels and innovated it. In the time-space of the narration, he uses the cross-time means of flashback, pre-relation and unparalleled intercrossness skillfully, miraculously transforms the worlds of soul, ghost, fairy and dream into the whole, creating the various imaginary spaces and breaking through the bond of the limited time-space of narration. In the artistic space of the length being relatively short, events relatively centralized and main thread not very complex, he extends the freedom of classical Chinese novel narration. In the rhetorical devices he uses the metaphors of words, image, behavior and space. By extruding the contradiction or narrative information, he also uses restricted narration or intercepts related information, suspended plots or even changes the ways of narration to create the beckoning suspense, he gives a rise to the misunderstanding of narrator's intention by the use of the difference in man's behavior and goal, and the intercrossness of communication. He unfolds the contrast in man's behavior and identity, use of words to build the rich ironic atmosphere. He uses the figure if repetition in texts of the same novel and different one to enrich the narrative skills so as to realize the cliff-hanging narrative intention and deepen the connotation to a certain extent. In the depiction of characters, the center shifts to the farmers and wives living in mountain villages, poor scholars and women in poor families realizing the third shift of character center in ancient novels. Intellectuals in the novels changed from the traditional bookman personality to the worldly tendency of self-caring, showing concern for the difference of the poor and the rich and liking to be snobbish. While the women in the novel manifests the larruping change in the aspects of love, living style and colony character. In the language of the text, the novel describes the ordinary, the custom successfully, marking the close and blending from elegance to convention. In general, Strange Stories from a Scholar's Studio retorts the slide of the artistic level in narration since Song Dynasty. Tracing and exceeding the Tang legends, which reflect Pu-Songling's exploration, hard-working and the achievements in the narrative arts of the classical Chinese novels.