Variations In Folk Legends Along Luanhe River Basin

Among the prominent characteristics of folk legends is that they are related tospecific natural or social affairs and have a definite person, history, custom, naturalobject, or artificial content as their subject; creating a variety of stories, folk legendshave historical significance. The narrative style of the folk legend is more relaxedwhen ompared to myth, but it is more truthful and less arbitrary and fanciful than thefolktale. Because the folk legend has an obvious function of explaining a locality, therange of variation is relatively limited and stable, and the scope and degree ofvariation is relatively fixed. In addition, some specific traditions of narrating the folklegend contribute to the high level of control of variation. Therefore, this thesisfocuses on folk legends as its research object, using local knowledge to analyze thenatural, social, and cultural factors that may lead to variations in folk legends and tosystematically summarize the factors contributing to variation. Analyzing themechanisms and patterns of variation from a macroscopic view contributes toscholarship on folk legends.This thesis analyzes variation mechanisms at the macro level, including thenatural and social environment of the dissemination of folk legends, as well asvariation mechanisms at the microscopic level. The latter section of the thesisproceeds from external analysis to internal analysis, from a macroscopic to amicroscopic focus; from the perspective of communication studies, it discusses themicroscopic mechanisms of variation that occur within the dynamic situations ofnarration, analyzing the behaviors involved in disseminating folk legends andemphasizing the role of all people involved (including the narrator and audiences offolk legends). It analyzes the interpersonal relations of disseminating folk legendsamong narrators and audiences, the communications activities of the narrator andaudience, their interactive communicative functions, as well as the role of theenvironment of narration in stimulating variation.Through the analysis of folk legends along the Luanhe River basin, this thesisdiscusses the main factors influencing variation and summarizes the variationmechanisms of folk legend. From this study of the transformation of folk legendsalong Luanhe River basin, we can see the functions and influential patterns of thethree mechanisims, the macro-level natural geography and society and the micro-levelcommunication. Social change has a significant impact on the entire social life, andthe economy, politics and culture play an important role in the development andvariation of folk legends. As a part of the microscopic system, the transmissionactivities of humans also are important factors in variation in folk legends. Withoutthe communication activities of human, folk legends cannot survive, let alone develop and grow over time.The research object of this paper is the folk legend along the Luanhe River basin.In this cultural area, the factors leading to variations in folk legends are regional anddo not represent universal laws of variation in folk legends and oral literature. Inaddition, the variation mechanisms form a complete and inseparable organism, withinwhich each factor simultaneously or successively plays a specific role to make themechanism work. This paper divided the variation mechanisms into several chaptersin order to discuss each factor in detail rather than to deny the unified nature of thevariation mechanisms.