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How to Make a Story Beautiful: On Aesthetic Dialectics of Liao zhai zhi yi
LI Hong-xiang
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2016.06.011
East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
How to write a beautiful story? It is an important question to Chinese writers because novel has not been regarded as a formal genre until late Qing Dynasty. Pu Songling answers this question with his work Liao zhai zhi yi (Strange tales from a Chinese studio). This paper aims to study his narrative arts. There are four sections included. In part 1, this paper introduces a definition of the aesthetic dialectics and its embodiment in Chinese classical literary theory; in part 2, this paper takes the Liao zhai story as example to interpret Pu Songling’s dialectic relation between description and narration; in part 3, I will show how Liao zhai presents beauty by unexpected but reasonable changes; and in last part, I give more importance to the stories concerning ordinary things for the reason that Pu Songling could make them interesting and beautiful. In the end, the paper concludes that Pu Songling is successful storyteller by using dialectic arts, which should be learned by Chinese writers.
Liao zhai, beauty, change, aesthetic dialectics, narration
Heidegger, Martin. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought. (Albert Hofstadter, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
Pu, Songling. (2010). Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. (Herbert A. Giles, Trans.). HK: Tuttle Publishing.
Pu, Songling. (2011). Complete Works of Liao zhai zhi yi. Zhang Youhe, (Ed.). Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House.
Kong, Lingjing. (1982). Historical Materials of Chinese Novels. Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House.
Wang, Guowei. (1960). Ren Jian Ci Hua. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House.