Yang Maojian And His Magnum Opus Jing Chen Za Lu:And History Of Study On History Of Early Peking Opera(Before 1949)

Yang Maojian was a famous writer of Peking Opera history in Dao-guang period.His book Jing Chen Za Lu(or the Operatic Circle in Bejing) records activities of famous actors, achievements of Peking Opera, and developments of the operatic circle in in Jia-Dao period. It is one of the representatives of earliest Peking opera history works. However, scholars have ignored value of Jing and have done little study on it because this book is not widely spread. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on exploring Yang, his magnum opus Jing and his historical thoughts. I hope that this dissertation will be helpful to study Yang and his historical thoughts. The first chapter mainly researches the life of Yang: I find that the writing of Jing is influenced by his depressed unsuccessful life and enthusiasm for Dream of Red Mansions via presentation of his life and works. In the second chapter, by combing Jing, I illustrate the process of gradual strengthened consciousness for writing Peking Opera history,and continuous improvements of codification, including compiling ideas, compiling methods and material-taken methods. The third chapter analyzes the historical thoughts of Jing from elements of criticism and methods of criticism. The fourth chapter focuses on significations and limitations of Jing and early Peking Opera history books. Actually, early Peking Opera history books are immature in many aspects, but methodology involves both the description, research, and other elaborate methods of historical research, which covers the general types of historical research.Thus, the contemporary works of Peking Opera history have to explore new perspectives and modalities to enrich academic research of Peking Opera history.