2026-05-24T08:12:55Zhttps://keep.lib.asu.edu/oai/requestoai:keep.lib.asu.edu:node-1558402024-12-20T18:25:12Zoai_pmh:alloai_pmh:repo_items155840
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.45556
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
All Rights Reserved
2017
2019-08-01T08:12:05
xviii, 347 pages : illustrations (some color)
Doctoral Dissertation
Academic theses
Text
eng
chi
Wu, Siyuan
West, Stephen H.
Cutter, Robert Joe
Oh, Young
Ling, Xiaoqiao
Arizona State University
Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2017
Includes bibliographical references (pages 291-329)
English and Chinese
Field of study: East Asian languages and civilizations
My dissertation primarily investigates the vast literary corpus of “Qiantang meng”<br/><br/>錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved<br/><br/>specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which<br/><br/>appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song<br/><br/>scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su<br/><br/>Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during<br/><br/>the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an<br/><br/>early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao<br/><br/>herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an<br/><br/>extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary<br/><br/>genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous<br/><br/>notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how<br/><br/>travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help<br/><br/>develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is<br/><br/>representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that<br/><br/>collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and<br/><br/>express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living”<br/><br/>complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can<br/><br/>reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and<br/><br/>reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression<br/><br/>of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally <br/><br/>dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are<br/><br/>intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the<br/><br/>literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties<br/><br/>formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and<br/><br/>individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the<br/><br/>complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape<br/><br/>during the late imperial period.
Literature
Art History
Dreams in literature
Travel in literature
Notebooks
Chinese literature--Ming dynasty, 1368-1644--History and criticism.
Chinese literature--Qing dynasty, 1644-1912--History and criticism.
Travels, dreams and collecting of the past: a study of "Qiantang meng" (A dream by Qiantang River) in late Imperial Chinese literature