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- Genre: Academic theses
- Language: Chinese
Description
Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716-97) is often thought of as a rebellious figure within the eighteenth-century intellectual and literary landscape. His perceived rejection of nearly all aspects of Confucian values was so extreme that he was even dubbed a "sinner against the teachings of Confucius." This thesis examines six stories within Yuan Mei's Zi buyu 子不語 (What Confucius Did Not Talk About) and, through close reading, shows how Yuan Mei utilizes each foreign group's physical traits and their ability to verbally and/or ethically communicate with the Chinese protagonist, in order to reflect their adherence to Confucian values and acceptance of Chinese imperial authority to arrange them along a spectrum of humanness that reflects the Chinese-foreign distinction. Furthermore, by examining each story in their historical and literary contexts, it is discovered that nearly every foreign group portrayed in Zi buyu is based on historical groups that actually existed on the periphery of the Qing empire, and that the different degrees of foreignness of each subject reflect each historical foreign group's acquiescence to or rebellion against the imperial authority of the Qing empire. Contrary to commonly held opinions, Yuan Mei's negotiation of foreignness demonstrates his own deep subscription to Confucian ethics and adherence to imperial order.
ContributorsCampos, Miles (Author) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Thesis advisor) / Oh, Young Kyun (Committee member) / West, Stephen H. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Li He (790-816), an outstanding poet full of literary talent in
classical Chinese poem history, his poignant words, incredible literary construction, nether artistic conception and nuanced peculiar poem style owned him the reputation of “ghostly, demonic genius” 鬼才. Scholars demonstrated that his ghostly and demonic style has much to do with the special imagery and allusion in his poetry. However, this kind of ghostly appeal of literature exactly have much to do with the large quantity of sensory vocabulary that the poet is expert in using in his poems, which evokes resonance from the readers/audiences. Li He fuses visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile sensation in his poems, building up his special writing style, evoking and creating a sensorial space for readers. The thesis concentrates on analyzing the sensory vocabulary in Li He’s poetry, sonic depiction in particular, which are rarely discussed before, based on which making further conclusion about the artistic conception and the special style of Li He’s poetry.
classical Chinese poem history, his poignant words, incredible literary construction, nether artistic conception and nuanced peculiar poem style owned him the reputation of “ghostly, demonic genius” 鬼才. Scholars demonstrated that his ghostly and demonic style has much to do with the special imagery and allusion in his poetry. However, this kind of ghostly appeal of literature exactly have much to do with the large quantity of sensory vocabulary that the poet is expert in using in his poems, which evokes resonance from the readers/audiences. Li He fuses visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile sensation in his poems, building up his special writing style, evoking and creating a sensorial space for readers. The thesis concentrates on analyzing the sensory vocabulary in Li He’s poetry, sonic depiction in particular, which are rarely discussed before, based on which making further conclusion about the artistic conception and the special style of Li He’s poetry.
ContributorsWen, Yu (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Oh, Young Kyun (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
My dissertation primarily investigates the vast literary corpus of “Qiantang meng”
錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved
specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which
appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song
scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su
Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during
the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an
early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao
herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an
extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary
genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous
notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how
travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help
develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is
representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that
collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and
express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living”
complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can
reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and
reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression
of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally
dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are
intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the
literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties
formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and
individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the
complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape
during the late imperial period.
錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved
specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which
appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song
scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su
Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during
the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an
early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao
herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an
extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary
genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous
notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how
travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help
develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is
representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that
collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and
express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living”
complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can
reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and
reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression
of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally
dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are
intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the
literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties
formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and
individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the
complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape
during the late imperial period.
ContributorsWu, Siyuan (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Cutter, Robert Joe (Committee member) / Oh, Young (Committee member) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 [Explaining depictions of reality and analyzing graphs of words] (100 AD), written by Xu Shen 許慎of Eastern Han dynasty, is known as the first comprehensive dictionary for Chinese characters. However, the earliest complete edition of the Shuowen available today is the Songkanben 宋刊本 (Woodblock printed edition from the Song dynasty). As a result, Songkanben is employed as the primary source in most studies on the Shuowen conducted by scholars after the Song dynasty. In 1982, the discovery of Tangxieben Shuowen mubu canjuan 唐寫本說文木部殘卷 (The incomplete juan under wood classifier of the Shuowen written in manuscript form in the Tang), shed light on a new angle of view in examining the Shuowen, mostly developed from Songkanben. In this paper, after an introduction on the Songkanben by Xu brothers, as well as the discovery and dating of the incomplete manuscript form of Shuowen from Tang, a comparative study between the Songkanben and Tangxieben of the Shuowen from five aspects: order of entries, the appearance of the Small Seal script of a few entries, the explanation of the meaning of some characters, the graphic analyze and the fanqie 反切 phonetic notation for some entries. The hypothesis presented in this thesis is that Tangxieben, with its antiquarian value, advantages and features, though not older for sure, may belong to an older tradition. And it suggests that there is a scholarship of the Shuowen during the Tang. And Xiao Xuben 小徐本by Xu Kai 徐鍇 (920-74), from some specific aspects in the comparison, tends to be closer to Tangxieben compared with Da Xuben 大徐本by Xu Xuan 徐鉉 (917-92). Consequently, as the original text of the Shuowen is not available today and what we have studied on the Shuowen basically is based on the editions by Xu brothers, it would be reasonable to keep this in mind, and refer to different editions of the Shuowen and critically examine them in philological studies related to it when apply and study the Shuowen nowadays.
ContributorsGao, Can (Author) / Oh, Young Kyun (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / West, Stephen H. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017