Reenchantment Of Wolf Images In Both Eastern And Western Civilizations

Wolf, as an animal image, is endowed with multiple meanings in the varied human cultural systems. During the evolution of human cultures, the image of wolf is not static at all. Instead, it has experienced shifts from being diversified to being deviled, and at last stabilized. Ever since the 20th century, wolf images, under a sequence of cultural impacts, have been reenchanted to a certain extent, bringing further reflections on culture on the part of modern people.The researches by far mostly take personified wolf images as the object of study, with very few studies rendered on pure animal images, let alone concerning the analysis of wolf images in the overall literary even cultural sense. This thesis takes the transformations of the wolf images in ancient and modern literatures as the object of study, attempting to make an interpretation and analysis of several wolf images by referring to two novels—Guillotine composed by Aitmatov and Cherish Memory of the Wolf by Jia Pingwa respectively. It tries to find out some relevant human cultural factors implied in the two novels through cross-cultural explanations.The main body of this thesis consists of four parts.Part One introduces the symbolization of wolf images in ancient literary works. Wolf images have been referred to very often in both Chinese history and western cultural history with various symbolic meanings, especially in the ancient myths and legends. The wolf images of this period of literary works can be generally divided into five types, which is discussed in details in this part. With distinctive contrast, the mobility and simplification of wolf images in later literary works can be brought to light.Part Two probes into the reenchantment of wolf images in modern literature through the analysis of the two novels. It discusses the new characteristics of wolf images in 20th century literature by setting forth the concept "reenchantment". With the special focus on the two novels, Guillotine and Cherish Memory of the Wolf, the connotative cultural meanings endowed by the characterization of different animal images can be explicated in contrast to the wolf images. With the analysis of wolf images, establishment and reshaping of the cultural basis of animal images are made.Part Three expounds the reenchantment of wolf images from the perspective of cross-cultural study. The emergence of wolf images both in Chinese and foreign literatures can reflect the cultural differences between China and western world. Meanwhile, they can also reflect the similarities of human mind in its development against the background of different cultural systems. Although wolf images were once characterized as evil symbols in both Chinese and western cultures, yet they have never stayed far away from human spiritual world. The causes of such conflicting things are also analyzed in this part accordingly.As a concluding section, Part Four summarizes the significance of the reenchantment of wolf images in modern world. Simply speaking, wolf images, as "the other" in the human world, bring people into self-reflections, through which human meditations on modernity as well as their inquiry into self identity can be thoroughly reflected.Only through human beings' emotional selection and reproduction, during which there exists a process of re-creation, can an image enter their inner world. Likewise, it does not necessarily change people's viewpoints about wolf images in spite of the influences of new literary works in modern times. This thesis simply hopes to provide a new perspective in interpreting wolf images, and comes up with the profound implications of wolf images in the process of their transformations.