NOVELTY AND VARIETY — ON THE DREAM NOVELS OF STRANGE STORIES FROM A CHINESE STUDIO

Abstract

There are almost 500 novels included in Pu Songling’s tale collection Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, of which more than 70 relate to dreams. However, nearly 30 novels can be called dream novels in a formal sense, such as Mural, Becoming Immortal and Fengyang Scholar. The main features of dream novels are novelty and variety. On the basis of inheritance from the previous Chinese dream novels, Pu’s dream novels have innovated in some ways with new changes or development of the theme. Further, novelty in artistic forms lies in the bold and innovative narrative techniques. Also, Pu’s dream novels are more diverse and vary in the content and form which have broken through the plainness of the previous. The content covers a wide range of topics, among which society, love and philosophy are the top three. In the form of writing dreams, there are multiple forms such as whole dreams, intermittent dreams, dreams within dreams, repeated dreams, daydreams, etc.