Human's Transformation In Ancient Classical Chinese Novels

The imagination that human bodies or souls were transformed into inhuman or objects, blended with primitives' pious religion of pantheism and souls' eternity, origins in primeval tribes. The earliest story that King Yan' s daughter is transformed into a bird named JingWei, pitching pieces of wood and stones into the East Sea in revenge for her death in it appeared in the Classic of Mountains and Rivers.Also, a fairy's soul is transformed into grass. The mystery story in WeiJin NanBei Dynasty is marked with primitives' fantasies as well as primitive fairy tales, which inherit the primitives' traditional believes and worships in pantheism. However, the authors did not mean to write mystery stories, as their responsibilities were to record the transformations only, simply and truly, and they took up a calm and objective attitude. Whereas, this situation varied in Tang Dynasty, those simple, short stories were changed into long, sinuous and euphuistic ones, thus authors' intentions of creations appeared from then on. From the-Legends in Tang Dynasty to Strange Tales of a Lonely Studio the creations of human transformation includes cultural contents and authors' tastes at the very age, furthermore, those creations manifest unique tastes and artistic qualities with the changing backgrounds and cultural thoughts. This thesis tries to collect the works of human transformation to find out their processes of development in tastes, moreover, it also analyzes and explains their artistic value when they were set at their own ages.The thesis is consists of four chapters. The first chapter analyzes the novels of human transformation in Tang Dynasty and Five Dynasty, in terms of their types and connotative meanings. The second chapter which demonstrates the works of human transformation in Note Novels in Song Dynasty, divides the works into two types: omen and Nemesis, besides, it analyzes the conceptions of fortune and ethics according to the connotative meanings those novels' content convey. Chapter three confines stories from Ming Dynasty to the appearance of Strange Tales of a Lonely Studio in Qing Dynasty, and it analyzes forms and tastes in those novels. The last chapter, chapter four, discusses the tastes in human transformation, mainly in terms of story types, authors' tastes and narration.