| Abstract |
The Tang Chuanqi, a genre of narrative tale and fiction, places a unique position in the history of Chinese Literature. Not only enjoyed among the ordinary readers, it has been also diversely interpreted by critics across time. Generally, the criticisms on Tang Chuanqi can be induced into two main methods. One of them is called “Textual Analysis” based on “New Criticism”, whose main effort only focused on the textual aesthetics itself, dealing little with the authors’ writing process, background, intention and aim. The other is called “Index to the Hidden Meanings of the narrative fiction,” whose theorists devote themselves to the studies of authors’ life, writing intention, social background along with its morality. Meanwhile, they also find out the underlined allusions and implications the authors encoded in their works by comparing the similarities between characters in the Tang Chuanqi and the contemporaries in the authors’ time. In this paper, I am going to concentrate on one of well-known Tang Chuanqi, Yingying Zhuan 鶯鶯傳authored by Yuan Zhen元稹. Firstly, I will respectively introduce two methodological studies, “Autobiographical interpreter” (a branch of “Index to the Hidden Meanings of the narrative fiction”) and “Anti-autobiographical interpreter,” used in the interpretation of Yingying Zhuan. Additionally, I will challenge the thesis of “Autobiographical interpreter,” which argues that the character of Zhang sheng 張生 is the projection of its author. Then, I will elaborate on difference between the history research and literature study, and explain the reasons causing two interpretations in Yingying Zhuan. Finally, I will conclude that the fictionality and reality in the Yingying Zhuan are so complicated and not so easy to distinguish one another; thus we need more than careful theories and interpretations to analyze this literature work. |
