A Form Analysis Of The Plot "Recounting The Revolutionary Past" In The Model Peking Opera The Legend Of The Red Lantern

The legend of the Red Lantern, one of the "eight Revolutionary Model Peking Operas", is regarded as a canonical opera in the history of modern theatre. From the perspective of the omniscient narrative, the present paper carries out a form analysis on the core plot "Recounting the Revolutionary Past" in the opera based on a comparison of different versions of the opera. It is pointed out that Model Peking Operas have extremely flexible narrative perspectives. The narrative capacity is expanded by the persona’s recounts and the conversion of the characters’ roles is realized by recomposing narrative time. In the opera The legend of the Red Lantern, the omniscient narrator, who dominates the events, is hidden among the characters to intervene the opera’s narrative by means of improving the narrative structure of Li Tiemei and constructing the spoken parts of Grandma Li. A breakthrough in style is therefore achieved.The clever combination of various artistic means constitutes the narrative aesthetic strategies, which revises the traditional narrative logic step by step to achieve the modernity of the revolutionary narrative of the opera, and presents as ritualized performance of aesthetic narrative.