| We can find more details about the story of "Mr. Zhao Yan Begging for Longer Life" in both The Sou-Shen-Ji with the editions of Eight Volumes, Twenty Volumes or Dunhuang Edition and the69th Chapter of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. There are quite a lot disputes about the origin of the story. However, the earliest written record is The Sou-Shen-Ji of Dunhuang Edition. Most scholars hold the idea that the story originates from The Sou-Shen-Ji written by Gan Bao. Except for the description in the The Sou-Shen-Ji and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the story is always mentioned in many local traditional operas and folk stories, which stands for its long history. Our thesis is mainly aiming at searching all the relevant materials to the story as much as possible, which include literary works and ancient records, legendaries, traditional operas, novels, song bands accompanied drums, carving, painting, etc., to make a comparative analysis. With this rich documents and information and detailed and complete analysis, we make every effort to reflect the historical development process and the geological distribution.In this thesis, we mainly apply methods of philology such as contents, edition and emendation to sort out the text system of the story. Meanwhile, we also adopt the methods of story theory like motifs, types, history of inheritance to analyze the story’s plots, types, inherited system and spatial and temporal changes. Furthermore, we use the methods of literary theory to analyze the spread of the story in novels, traditional operas, folk tales, folk arts, etc. A lot of forms and tables are included in this thesis, which results in clarity and simplicity of the description. |
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