Study On Phylogeny Of Fairy Tale

Fairy tale occupies an important and unique position in ideological and cultural history of human being. Every era has its own fairy tale form, which constitutes the phylogeny of fairy tale, and reflects the development of social backgrounds and trend of thought even incarnates changing of human deep mental structure. Although the phylogeny of fairy tale has got more and more researchers’attention recently, according to the author, to some extent, they have not reach the crucial point. Taking typical texts of every age for instance, this thesis tries to discuss the phylogeny of fairy tale from psychological and sociological perspective, and then probes into meaning of it in history of human thought. The different functions and various evaluations of fairy tale in different eras are the core of the essence of the thesis, which not only embodied in the changes of fairy tale’s exterior forms, but also the changes reflecting the situation of those periods.The thesis finds two breaking points in fairy tale’s phylogeny, which are in the middle of the19th century and in the middle of the20th century. There are two reasons. The first one is psychological reason, for that "children" as a historical concept was found in1850’s, and in1960’s, people started to use a new term called "Peter Pan Syndrome". Could ages be the paragraph of life? These two psychological discoveries mark the shifts of it. Secondly, from the angle of sociology and literary and art criticism, people give different valuations to the inner core of fairy tale if we take these two points as time boundaries. The thesis thinks that the primeval inner core of fairy tale is giving up phenomenon truth to contain every existence in essential truth. Before the nineteenth century, when rationalism had not been the dominator of human mind, fairy tale had been universally accepted. But from the19th century up, people have begun to sneer at fantastic representation of fairy tale for its "irrationality" till the twentieth century, the rediscovery of rationality of absurd in fairy tale. The researchers consider the fantastic mode, inherited from our first ancestor, is the primeval experiences in recognizing the truth of the world.Based on the above-mentioned nodes, there are three parts in the main body of the thesis. The first part analyzes "Human Fairy Tale" before the "discovery of children", for its cognitive function, which is regarded as the vehicle of information and knowledge in those days. The second part comes to the development of "Children’s Fairy Tale" and the decline of it. Because indoctrination, with the argument in this thesis, is the main feature of the fairy tale in this period, there are a mass of plots in dualistic structure in the fairy tales of this period, which could be the method of moral indoctrinization for children in that time. The rebirth, in mass text or pop culture, of primitive form of fairy tale is the major content of part three. The thesis names the rebirth tale "Adults’Fairy Tale", for its most significant function is spiritual consolation for adults living in post-modern society. The complete structure and perfect ending make "Adults’Fairy Tale" become expectative text of people with "Peter Pan Syndrome".In its long term evolution, fairy tale has got a lot of changes, such as transformation from folk fairy tale to literary fairy tale, post-modernism writers’deconstruction on classical fairy tale, and so on. If the study adopted the current concept of fairy tale, which contains all the types of it in history, the research scope would be too large to cause the study meaningless. Thus, Vladimir Jakovlevic Propp’s approach of structuralism was used to limit the research range. Knowing the changes of fairy tale deeply invested in the social background, the thesis analyzes the subtle relationship between phylogeny of fairy tale and its context, with the attempt of clarifying current cultural trends.