Remembrance Of The Age Of Innocence: A Probe Into Archetypal Patterns In Chinese And Western Classic Children’s Literature

Children’s literature, a unique literary form with fantasy as its feature, hasplayed a significant role in both Chinese and western literary history for all the time.“Children’s spiritual life, regarded as the repeatability of the spiritual state ofprimitive men, is actually the reproduction of primitive culture of the ancient world inthe modern society”(Ding57). Primarily reflecting children’s spiritual state,children’s literature is the recurrence and repeatability of the ancient culture and alsothe legacy and deposit of the primitive culture. Full of innocence, imagination, andperceptual thinking, children’s literature largely retains some important characteristicsof mythology and possesses some primitive thinking traits of human childhood, with aplain pattern expressing the significance and value of human life. Hence, by adoptingthe perspective of archetypal criticism, this thesis mainly probes into some importantarchetypal patterns embodied in Chinese and western classic children’s literature.Based upon Carl Jung’s archetypal theory and Northrop Frye’s literary archetypes,this thesis mainly tries to explore some recurring archetypal patterns hidden inChinese and western classic children’s literature, so as to represent human’s yearningsfor truth, goodness and beauty and also to reflect human’s unremitting pursuing forthe completeness of soul and the significance of human life.This thesis contains all together four chapters. The first chapter gives a briefintroduction to the studies on Chinese and western classic children’s literature, and abrief introduction to the features and primitive thinking of children’s literature, and it also makes a particular interpretation to archetypes and archetypal criticism. Thesecond chapter tries to find out some major archetypes embodied in Chinese andwestern classic children’s literature. The third chapter of this thesis mainly copes withthree important archetypal events in children’s literature and then represents human’sunremitting pursuing for the significance of life. Ultimately, the fourth chapter makesa conclusion about this thesis and summarizes its significance and limitations at thesame time.