Resumen de Ye Xian and her sisters: the role of a tang story in the Cinderella cycle
Ye Xian is the protagonist of a story written in the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) which has been defined as “the Chinese Cinderella” and “the first written Cinderella”. I have carried out an analysis of the tale to demonstrate that the motifs of this narrative, which have been usually ascribed by scholars to Tang culture, are in fact hardly compatible with it. Moreover, the story presents a broken narrative structure and unclear elements which disclose the difficulties of adaptation of foreigner motifs to Chinese culture. These data indicate that this text is a combination of previous narratives containing Cinderella motifs, thus making Ye Xian the first version containing all the elements present in the modern Cinderella. In order to complete this analysis I have utilised three methodological perspectives, Classicists’, Sinologists’ and Folklorists’ approaches, according to the three different types of narratives investigated, to study this story and its role in the Cinderella cycle. This tripartite methodology is therefore tailored to the case, combining the epistemological approaches to create a paradigm functional for future research where tales are hardly connectible to a precise literary system and whose genre represents a crucial key to interpretation.
