Filtering by
- All Subjects: Asian Literature
- All Subjects: Art criticism
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Brown, Claudia
Based on literary works produced by the multiethnic literati of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), this dissertation examines Chinese conceptions of the Steppe world in the early years of the Mongol era (1206–1260). As I show, late Jin literati, who took arduous journeys in the Eurasian Steppes, initiated transcultural communications between the Chinese and Steppe worlds. Their writings encouraged more Chinese literati to reach out to the Mongols and hence facilitated the spread of the ideal Confucian-style governance to the Mongol empire. In general, I follow the approach of New Historicism in analyzing poetic works. Even though the Mongol conquest of China damaged many northern literary texts, materials surviving from the thirteenth century still feature a great diversity. I brought historical records and inscriptions on stela to study the social conditions under which these literary works were produced. This dissertation aims to contribute a new voice to the ongoing effort to modify the traditional linear understanding of the development of Chinese literary tradition.
In this thesis, three chapters discuss the relationship between Chinese modern and contemporary art and the CCP. In my theoretical exposition, I argue that the artistic/intellectual subjectivity of modern Chinese artists gradually developed and changed during the conflict and struggle with the Communist rule.
In the first chapter, I introduce the biography and artistic creation of Chinese literati painters under the communist rule, exemplified by Wu Hufan吳湖帆. I analyze and demonstrate how the subjectivity of the traditional literati gradually lost strength under the pressure of nationalism, the disenchantment with modernization, and communism. In the second chapter, I focus on the Scar Art art movement of the 1970s to the 1980s, as well as representative artists and their works in this direction of art, such as Cheng Conglin程叢林 and Gao Xiaohua高小華. In this chapter, I use feminism and Foucault's political-philosophical theories to explain these visual expressions of the memory of historical trauma in Scar Art during this period. In Chapter 3, by discussing the works of two artists, He Gong何工 and Ai Weiwei艾未未, in the context of Foucault’s political philosophy, I argue that artists how to express their intellectual subjectivity and political resistance through their contributions to Chinese contemporary art.
This dissertation explores the representation of female imagery associated with the Yuan pleasure quarters by examining a reservoir of Yuan sanqu. Previous scholarship has studied this topic using either historical material or zaju drama texts but has more or less ignored the voluminous corpus of sanqu. Furthermore, scholarly inquiries of Yuan sanqu either have emphasized its development from the Song ci lyrical tradition or its colloquial features. In consequence, the complexity of sanqu as an independent literary genre has been neglected. Using the representation of female imagery of the pleasure quarters in Yuan sanqu as an entry point, on one hand, this dissertation examines the dynamics of this urban and textual space. On the other, it focuses on rarely-studied sanqu pieces and analyzes them in a new light. The pleasure quarters and the production of Yuan sanqu are closely related to each other. In particular, the pleasure quarters are both revealed through the creative process of sanqu and have established sanqu as a distinctive aesthetic experience. The first chapter will focus on women of the pleasure quarters from the perspective of their hierarchical distinctions in terms of beauty, performative nature, and desirability as companions. Chapter two discusses the representation of women of the pleasure quarters in Yuan sanqu. Distinctive from the exclusive focus on privileged outstanding courtesans in poetic and lyrical tradition, Yuan sanqu depicted women from different registers of pleasure quarters. Thus, the genre formulated a diverse picture of images, rhetoric, and modalities. Chapter three examines a major literary tradition mainly sustained by the Yuan sanqu tradition, which is the story of Shuang Jian and Su Xiaoqing. As one of the most important and widespread literary traditions at play during the Yuan, Yuan sanqu writers’ representation of this pleasure-quarters-based story manifests the fulness and diversity of Yuan sanqu as a distinctive literary genre. In the epilogue, I focus on a zaju script by Ma Zhiyuan and an anonymous song suite in relation to this story. By so doing, I intend to show how Yuan qu lyrics incorporated the poetic, lyrical, and dramatic traditions in a somewhat promiscuous way.
