Towards a typology of love dramas : through a comparison between some Chinese and other plays

• Main Author: He, Yubin
• Published: University of Edinburgh 1996
• Subjects: 800
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.652280

This thesis seeks to further elucidate the connotations of love as a philosophical, sociological and literary topic in drama. Comparing a number of plays, it suggests and elaborates various standards for a partial initial typology of love dramas, concentrating on the dramaturgy, content and language styles of Chinese, Indian, German, English and French examples, thus casting the net widely to provide the broad range to complement and interact with my analytical detail. This study is organised according to an underlying chain of logical categories not any chronological sequence of development, and explores and links the classifications of religious love, imperial and royal love, love freed from spatial and temporal bonds, and universal love. Proceeding in a basically empirical manner, this work, in intimate and indispensable involvement with the central examination of the love theme, also gives close and considerable attention to the effects of stylistic elements, such as the resort in certain plays to the imagery of beauty and sublimity as embodiments of the idea of love, the collective subconscious informing such aspects as the linguistic, rhetorical and animistic, the distortion of time and space, histrionic semiology, absurdity as a modernistic aesthetic category, the alienation effect in Classical Chinese theatre and Epic Theatre, and other key questions. The issue of mutual influences between China and the West is broached, judgements on the mixed impact from Western drama theory on the Chinese are suggested, and the widely neglected and highly significant problem of the influence of Chinese drama on Europe and America is highlighted, while the dramaturgical Westernisation of China in the name of modernisation, crucially involving the treatment of love, is also extensively probed and analysed.