On The Supernatural Texts In The Tales Of Marvels Of The Tang Dynasty

The study of the Tales of Marvels of the Tang Dynasty is one of the significant studies of the Tang Literature. The Tales of Marvels were as marvelous as the poems in the Tang literary history. Critic Wu Yinglin in the Ming Dynasty once commented,"The way of narrating bizarre stories was very popular during the Six Dynasties, though most of them were just recording those wide-spreading stories and hadn't expressed it well with good imagination and conception. Not until the Tang Dynasty did the writers work out the fictions with their curiosity in order to make it perfect."Mr. Lu Xun considered this as,"Like poems, fictions changed during the Tang Dynasty even if they were still focused on recording fairy tales and anecdotes. Compared to those similar ones in the Six Dynasties, fictions of the Tang Dynasty had tactful narrative and exquisite diction. Therefore, the gradual progress is obvious, especially that the writers at that time began to write on purpose."From their comments, it could be found that"write with curiosity"and"write on purpose"were the features of the Tales of Marvels of the Tang Dynasty. In other words, the writers worked out the Tales of Marvels consciously and out of curious minds.Curiosity and consciousness as the writing characteristics of the Tales of Marvels of the Tang Dynasty definitely lead to the supernatural contents. Consequently, this paper is entitled"On the Supernatural Texts in the Tales of Marvels of the Tang Dynasty", aims at those supernatural texts and plots, and analyses concretely from the study of the tales of marvels itself. This paper divides into five parts, as follows:Part One: the quantification statistics. In order to give a clear impression and initial understanding, this part analyses the quantification statistics of the supernatural texts and plots appeared in the Tales of Marvels.Part Two: the categories and its sources. This part divides into three sections: ghosts and deities, demons and monsters, and dreams. The first section includes ghosts and deities separately; the second one includes animal-like, plant-like and lifeless monsters.Part Three: the theme and implied meaning. In this part, the love, politic-related and life-related themes are chose. The analysis of different tales of marvels helps to further explain the theme and implied meaning of the supernatural texts expressed in each section.Part Four: the origin from real life and its cultural implication. This part discusses about the concept of family status, the imperial examination system in the Tang Dynasty, and Buddhism and Taoism in a wider field of cultural vision.Part Five: the narrative analysis. This part tries to find out the independence of fictions by analyzing the narrative perspective, construction and method.