誤入與遊歷:宋傳奇〈王榭〉仙鄉變型例探究
摘要
Although commenced and flourished during the Six Dynasties, the fairyland stories were not only popular at that time and their styles and contents followed by later generations, the stories also became the main theme of novels and dramas. However, the structure of the basic motif in the fairyland established in the Six Dynasties, although handed down and reshaped through the Tang and the Five Dynasties, had produced such a novel as Wang Xie of the Song Dynasty. Although following the structure of the fairyland motif, it actually described the adventure, by mistake, into the Kingdom of Swallows. The theme of the novel and its cultural significance were different from the original fairyland adventure, thus became the offshoot of the original fairyland stories. This paper discusses whether, in the novel Wang Xie, there were changes in body form in the metamorphosis between swallows and humans, in order to understand how these characters assumed the roles in the world of deities, immortals, ghosts, humans and beasts. We can further sort out the nature of space in knowing that swallows are close to humans and their habits of coming in the spring and leaving in the autumn, the author based on the facts that swallows come to co-inhabit with humans in the spring and leave for the south in autumn to a mysterious place not yet fully understood, he wrote his story with falsehood and reality. Thus the swallows were considered creatures with both avian and human morphs. They also had mysterious endowments not found in humans, thus avoided the tendency for the story to have negative implications that the characters aged and turned into spirits. It also served to define that the Kingdom of Swallows, though not as exquisite and transcendental as the fairyland, could not be treated as the world of demons. Therefore, it offered the readers the same feeling as in the adventure of a fairyland. In the novel Wang Xie, the author purposely omitted the implication of the original fairyland