The Historical Value of Legendary Novels in Tang Dynasty

The Historical Value of Legendary Novels in the Tang Dynasty Apart from creating many immortal works, Legendary Novels in the Tang Dynasty have also become the precious wealth of China literature, edifying the sentiments and aesthetic tastes of generations, and also providing a large number of materials, plot patterns, character prototypes and even language templates for later novels and dramas.

According to the incomplete statistics of Hu Shiying's New Stories, about 90 vernacular short stories were written according to the legends of Tang and Five Dynasties before the Qing Dynasty. Long chapters, such as Water Margin, The Journey to the West, Jin Ping Mei, Legend of Pingyao, Legend of Awakening the World, Scholars, etc. , but also learned artistic experience and material from the legends of the Tang and Five Dynasties.

Linguistic features of legendary novels in Tang dynasty;

The language of Tang legends is generally prose, but there are more than four sentences, and the syntax is relatively neat, following the tradition of strange novels in the Six Dynasties. Strange novels of the Six Dynasties, such as Searching for the Gods, are simple in language and do not pay attention to duality and rhetoric. Under the atmosphere of distinguishing "Wen" and "Pen" at that time, they belonged to the category of "Pen".

However, influenced by the prevalence of parallel prose, some sentences are quite neat in syntax and close to parallel prose in style. The legendary language of the Tang Dynasty developed along this road. A few chapters, such as You Xian Dong, even focus on parallel prose, but most of the works are basically prose, although mixed with parallel prose. However, due to the author's intention to attach importance to literary talent, the language of many works is quite gorgeous.