Matching Items (3)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Asian Literature
- Genre: Academic theses
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Chen, Huaiyu
Description
This thesis examines the play Qian Dayin zhichong Xie Tianxiang, written by the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) playwright Guan Hanqing (c.1225-1302). The first chapter of this paper provides brief background information about northern style Yuan drama (zaju) as well as a plot summary and notes about the analysis and translation. Through a close reading of the play, I hope to illustrate how the play's complicated ending and lack of complete resolution reveals why it has received relatively little attention from scholars who have previously discussed other strong, intelligent female characters in Guan Hanqing's plays. The second chapter of this thesis includes translation of the play that is comprised of a wedge preceding the four acts. Before each act of the play is a critical introduction and analysis of the act to follow. Although many of Guan Hanqing's plays have been translated into English, this play has never been translated.
ContributorsByrnes, Kelli (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Zou, Yu (Committee member) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In 1072 Jōjin (1011-1081) boarded a Chinese merchant ship docked in Kabeshima (modern Saga) headed for Mingzhou (modern Ningbo) on the eastern coast of Northern Song (960-1279) China. Following the convention of his predecessors, Jōjin kept a daily record of his travels from the time he first boarded the Chinese merchant ship in Kabeshima to the day he sent his diary back to Japan with his disciples in 1073.
Jōjin’s diary in eight fascicles, A Record of a Pilgrimage to Tiantai and Wutai Mountains (San Tendai Godaisan ki), is one of the longest extant travel accounts concerning medieval China. It includes a detailed compendium of anecdotes on material culture, flora and fauna, water travel, and bureaucratic procedures during the Northern Song, as well as the transcription of official documents, inscriptions, Chinese texts, and lists of personal purchases and official procurements. The encyclopedic nature of Jōjin’s diary is highly valued for the insight it provides into the daily life, court policies, and religious institutions of eleventh-century China. This dissertation addresses these aspects of the diary, but does so from the perspective of treating the written text as a material artifact of placemaking.
The introductory chapter first contextualizes Jōjin’s diary within the travel writing genre, and then presents the theoretical framework for approaching Jōjin’s engagement with space and place. Chapter two presents the bustling urban life in Hangzhou in terms of Jōjin’s visual and material consumption of the secular realm as reflected in his highly illustrative descriptions of the night markets and entertainers. Chapter three examines Jōjin’s descriptions of sacred Tendai sites in China, and how he approaches these spaces with a sense of familiarity from the textual milieu that informed his movements across this religious landscape. Chapter four discusses Jōjin’s impressions of Kaifeng and the Grand Interior as a metropolitan space with dynamic functions and meanings. Lastly, chapter five concludes by considering the means by which Jōjin’s performance of place in his diary further contributes to the collective memory of place and his own sense of self across the text.
Jōjin’s diary in eight fascicles, A Record of a Pilgrimage to Tiantai and Wutai Mountains (San Tendai Godaisan ki), is one of the longest extant travel accounts concerning medieval China. It includes a detailed compendium of anecdotes on material culture, flora and fauna, water travel, and bureaucratic procedures during the Northern Song, as well as the transcription of official documents, inscriptions, Chinese texts, and lists of personal purchases and official procurements. The encyclopedic nature of Jōjin’s diary is highly valued for the insight it provides into the daily life, court policies, and religious institutions of eleventh-century China. This dissertation addresses these aspects of the diary, but does so from the perspective of treating the written text as a material artifact of placemaking.
The introductory chapter first contextualizes Jōjin’s diary within the travel writing genre, and then presents the theoretical framework for approaching Jōjin’s engagement with space and place. Chapter two presents the bustling urban life in Hangzhou in terms of Jōjin’s visual and material consumption of the secular realm as reflected in his highly illustrative descriptions of the night markets and entertainers. Chapter three examines Jōjin’s descriptions of sacred Tendai sites in China, and how he approaches these spaces with a sense of familiarity from the textual milieu that informed his movements across this religious landscape. Chapter four discusses Jōjin’s impressions of Kaifeng and the Grand Interior as a metropolitan space with dynamic functions and meanings. Lastly, chapter five concludes by considering the means by which Jōjin’s performance of place in his diary further contributes to the collective memory of place and his own sense of self across the text.
ContributorsHarui, Kimberly Ann (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Bokenkamp, Stephen R (Committee member) / Chen, Huaiyu (Committee member) / Hedberg, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This dissertation explores the relationship between expressions of female virtue—predominantly chastity—and violence within two popular early Chinese literary traditions: Qiu Hu 秋胡 and Han Peng 韓朋. Both tales were in circulation by the Western Han (206 BCE–24 CE) and depict husbands and wives torn apart by conflict—the victims of drama instigated by men—and ultimately end with the righteous suicides of their female leads. Testifying to their enduring popularity, these stories were adapted by poets and prose writers alike, including prominent figures such as Fu Xuan, Yan Yanzhi, Li Shangyin, and Shi Junbao, as well as unknown composers of works discovered at Dunhuang. The results of their labor—poems, prose, and even a Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) stage adaptation—demonstrate the flexibility of these traditions as a means of exploring contemporary concerns regarding female integrity and talent, the dangers of beauty, women’s roles in the family, as well as socio-economic issues. By providing the first study of the portrayal of women within these influential traditions across genre and time, this dissertation not only contributes to the understanding of both tales as elite representations of idealized femininity, but also highlights how such popular traditions were subject to competing pressures of social norms, genre, and audience expectation. By examining and contrasting these disparate works, this study argues that these traditions were less singular tales that owed their existence to any given work than they were a broad collection of topoi that could be shuffled into differing configurations to meet the need of a given author at a given moment.
ContributorsWang-Wolf, Xuan (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Oh, Young Kyun (Committee member) / Chen, Huaiyu (Committee member) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021