In the 19th century, western society witnessed a boom of the technological revolution。 Various technological achievements and scientific theories sprang up at a high speed, which put people in great panic when in face of these unprecedented changes。 In the meantime, the appearance of Darwinian evolution was like a bomb which shook their spiritual world mainly depending on Christianism。 Material civilization was greatly developed at the expense of the recession of rich and abundant spiritual world in the past。 People felt at a loss and imminently tried to find the home of spirituals, which invisibly increased stress, making them escape from the real world and find something that can console them(Meng and Yang，2013:93)。 In this case, many authors at that time attempted to use their pens to create another world, in which they struggled and also pinned their hopes that could not be realized in reality。 Therefore, some characters of escapers came into being in literature works。 Washington Irving was a representative one among those people who had the urge to escape from the society at that time and also the earliest writer to write about escapism。 He put this desire in his novel, Rip Van Winkle, and then a vivid character was presented to people。

 However, the images of escapers does not only appear in English literature works but also in Chinese literature。 As a typical escaper in Chinese literature, Wang Zhi is a character full of mystery in the story of Wang Zhi Lan Ke。 It is a very short story with no more than one hundred Chinese characters happening in Jin dynasty(BC265-420)。 It is a story created and recreated by many writers with many versions in the books like Shu Yi Ji written by Ren Fang and Shui Jing Zhu written by Li Daoyuan。 Although there are many versions till now about this story, the contents in every version are nearly the same with several sentences。 Wang Zhi Lan Ke is a story about a person called Wang Zhi who came to Lan Ke Mountain with the purpose of cutting firewood。 In the mountain, he found his axe had got rusty after he enjoyed watching two strange persons play chess for several rounds。 He came back after about nearly one hundred years, because of such a long time, he left the real world to settle down in the mountain and pursue Taoism (Ren Fang, 1993)。 Later on, the story was often quoted in other writers’ works like Chinese famous poets, Liu Yuxi and Zhou Hongzheng。 It can be seen that this short story is so full of popularity among people that has been applied for so many times from writers’ pens。 It does convey something valuable deserving later generations to repeat and reproduced。文献综述

1。3 The purpose of the research

On the whole, though written in different times, the two stories, Rip Van Winkle and Wang Zhi Lan Ke, have analogous methods and plots adopted by writers from totally different backgrounds。 Both of the main characters went to the mountain, drank something or ate something that offered by weird persons, returned after long time and the most important thing was that they all escaped from time。 In a word, the two stories have many things in common。 However, behind the looking similar story framework and escape, there should be some differences because of the different cultural backgrounds。 As is known to all, literary works are a kind of reflection human society as well as thoughts of authors( It will be deeper explained in the following part)。 In this case, Rip Van Winkle and Wang Zhi Lan Ke should not be only considered as similar stories。 By comparing two escapes, people will have a better understanding of social situations in two stories and learn more about history。 In addition to that, people can also learn that how the social situations influence people and through the different escapes, people can reflect themselves and their present life and learn something like responsibilities, personal pursuit and the balance of them。