Water Margin And Shandong Folk Customs

As one of four famous classical Chinese novels, the research on Water Margin has appeared in quantity. It may be said to be the inevitable work for classical novel researchers even though the monographs from the perspective of folk customs are rare. In recent years, along with the transition and vigorous growth of cultural research, the research from the perspective of folk customs increases. As a famous classical Chinese novel which mainly describes the life of lower level class, large quantities of folk idioms are used in Water Margin. So it is necessary and meaningful to make a literal and cultural study of folk customs in it.From the whole book, the entire folk customs were almost covered in Water Margin, including the material folk custom, the social folk custom, the spiritual belief folk custom and the recreational folk custom. If they were all withdrawn and analyzed, the thesis then appears big and broad, and is also not a literature paper that should be loaded in the content. This article is divided into four parts and elaborates four kinds of folk customs which Water Margin involves--the material folk custom, the social folk custom, the spiritual belief folk custom and the recreational folk custom. They are also analyzed with the representative items. Comparisons are carried between the presented ones in the novel and the Shandong local ones in order to confirm that in the novel the folk customs have intrinsic relations with the Shandong local folk customs and to discover their similarities and differences.First, as a literary work, the folk customs are the essential part in Water Margin. The thesis tries to analyze and classify the typical folk custom phenomenon which involves in the book in order to obtain the evolution of the folk customs. As a generation accumulation book, Water Margin has experienced massive revisions. During the period of its existence, the folk customs also develops unceasingly. As for time, the folk custom phenomenon described in Water Margin which occurred in Song Dynasty, spread in the Yuan Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty and the earliest block-printed book or other woodblock editions, had the different characteristics of different times. As for the space, the story occurred mainly in Shandong. The novel has also written more about Shandong folk customs. But after all, the folk custom phenomenon is not the sole possession of one place. In the process of its spreading, is also inevitable that different folk customs are written into the novel by different persons. Even if it was the final writer deciding, he also inevitably put folk customs of his time and place into the novel and absorbed the different folk customs the different places. These characteristics are quite obvious in Water Margin. The inspection of the folk custom phenomenon in Water Margin from two aspects of time and region is a question which this thesis tries to solve. Second, it will then be a quite new inspection angle of view that the folk customs in Water Margin are placed under the view of the Shandong folk custom. The story occurs in Shandong and the heroic man's fact behavior mainly launches in Shandong so Shandong folk customs inevitably appear in the novel. As the main characteristics of Shandong, , the quite comprehensively systematic inspection on the folk custom phenomenon will be considered to be a meaningful topic as well as a new breakthrough of Water Margin research.