A Study On The Evolution Of The Stories In "YiJianzhi"

Yijianzhi, Written by Hong Mai in Southern Song Dynasty, is a novel talking about oddities. The number of the stories in it is as many as that in The Selection from Records of the Taiping Era. Its stories, most of which were narrated by others, are eccentric, interesting, popular and extensive. Therefore, the novelists and dramatist in later ages are eager to draw materials from it. We may discover its influences in a great many novels and dramas existed today.Yijianzhi had not been studied intensively until recent ten years. The academic circles focus most of their energy on the investigation of its editions and written time, and on the induction and elaboration of Hong Mai's viewpoints of novels. Some scholars also turn to the examination and collection of its fragments, which settled a substantive foundation for the further and deeper research of this book. As to such a voluminous book, however, the production of research is far too inadequate from perfection, neither in depth nor in scope. For example, its influences on the novels and dramas afterwards, which should be an important field of study, has seldom been investigated. Nearly all the researchers have noticed its significant influences, but only few of them try to collect and analyze this book, and furthermore, to probe more deeply into its function and value.Based on the comprehensive grasp of the its influences on the novels and dramas afterwards, this thesis studies the evolution of the stories in Yijianzhi via statistics and analysis. This paper also explains how many novels and dramas were affected by the book.This thesis can be divided into three chapters. The first chapter is about how the stories in this book evolved to the dramas afterwards. The unique points in their inherited process were generalized via data statistics. And the reason why those stories spread so widely were also investigated.The second chapter focus on the way those stories inherited, especially about the way how the novels and dramas were recomposed and recreated in Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty.In chapter Three, I pay attention to the explorations and analyses of the recreative motivation about those stories. Taking the awakening of the"feeling",the tradition of warning and education ,the beauty of balance as the starting point, I penetrated into how the latter playwrights and the novelists recomposed and recreated the stories under the function of traditional culture and burgeoning culture. The new connotation and implication, which existed when recomposed and recreated, were also analyzed in this paper. In the complementary discussion, I used the dialectical method to discriminate and verify the evolutional condition of those stories in Yijianzhi . Furthermore, I also generalized the advantages and the disadvantages of the recomposions and recreations.