Grimms’ Kinder- Und Hausmarchen As The Inspiration Of The Chinese Fairy Tale Col Lection Ertong Shijie With Regard Of The Narrative Structuringof The Roles Of Children

The May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement in the early twentieth century mark the peak of cultural communication between China and the West in China’s modern history. With an influx of Western thoughts into China, Chinese literati began to collect, collate, study, and further create fairy tales. Influenced by European classical fairy tales, particularly Grimms’Fairy Tales and Andersen’s Fairy Tales, a group of radical literati, represented by Zhou Zuoren, began to pay attention to a group of new audience, the children. It is against this cultural background that The World of Children, a journal edited by Zheng Zhenduo and published by the Commercial Press, came out in 1922.The present thesis, from the perspective of Intercultural Germanistik, holds that Chinese literary discourse’s turn to children is a significant achievement of intercultural communication between China and Germany in the beginning of twentieth century. Taking Grimms’Fairy Tales and The World of Children as its target texts, this thesis analyzes the roles these two works assign to children characters in their narrative strategies, explores the general opinions and assumptions about children reflected by these works, discusses the relations and distinctions between these opinions in the two cultures, and further probes the historical and cultural contexts behind this literary phenomenon. The present study pivots around three key questions:What kind of roles are given to children by these two works? How these works pay attention to and care for children in their texts? Why and how children became a social concern in that particular historical period? In sum, the present thesis adopts the theories of narratology and Intercultural Germanistik to conduct a parallel study on the roles of children characters in the aforementioned two works.When deciding on its research subject, the author recognized a huge gap between the existing researches on Grimms’Fairy Tales and The World of Children respectively. In contrast with the plentiful researches on Grimms’Fairy Tales by both Chinese and German scholars, most research on The World of Children are conducted by Chinese scholars from the perspectives of publishing and literary history; The World of Children has never gained any attention from German researchers. To fill in this gap, the present thesis puts Grimms’ Fairy Tales and The World of Children in the context of intercultural communication, explores the cultural connection revealed by these two works by analyzing the roles children play in various aspects.The first chapter of the thesis introduces the background of the subject, precedent researches, core questions, analytical methods, and the structure of this thesis. The second chapter offers the key definition of "fairy tale" and "children" by collecting and analyzing their various definitions in Chinese as well as German contexts. Fairy tale is not exclusively created for children, but both its form and its contents meet children’s aesthetic needs. The notion of children refers not merely to corporeal people, but also to a social construction. More specifically, it has three layers of meanings:young people under a certain age, a social identity with its elders and guardians, and child-like mind and nature. The third chapter introduces the analytical framework this study adopts, namely the narratological theories put forward by Mieke Bal and Gerard Genette. It also explains the standards by which this study selects its target texts. Chapter Four studies the roles of children in the fairy tales from three aspects of narrative strategy:the narrator or the narrating agent (the one who hears), the non-narrative discourse, and the focalizing. In terms of narrative strategy, one is to depict children as passive receivers by choosing an adult outside the texts as the narrator and inserting various forms of non-narrative discourses; another is to endow children with the role of the observer by taking characters inside the story (especially the child protagonist) as the focalizing agent. Chapter Five, from the layer of narrative contents, analyzes the typical images of children in the two works:children as rovers and explorers, children as the weak, and children as victors or rebels, and further concludes the commonality of and differences between the works. Chapter Six takes the social-historical context into consideration, and discusses the reasons for such depiction of children in these fairy tales.Finally, the present thesis comes to the following conclusion:During the Romantic Period when Grimms’Fairy Tales came into being, children were regarded as men in the process of developing and growing, therefore have plasticity. Although in a weaker position compared to adults, they were believed to have the ability of shouldering the mission of passing national culture. In order to create a sense of national identity, and to preserve the essence of national culture, the Grimm brothers cast their eyes to children, and depicted them as brave adventurers and final victors. During the May Fourth Movement when The World of Children was created, the long-forgotten children became the hope of national liberation, national awakening, and the realization of a brand new society. Inspired by the Western literature and culture, Chinese intellectuals began to pay attention to children, recognized their plasticity and potential for development, and created the unconventional image of adventurous and rebellious "new children" in their literary creation.