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.
beyond the reach of Lu Xun’s twentieth-century generic labels. Therefore, we should have
an acute awareness of the earlier limiting view of these categorizations, and our research
should transcend the limitations of these views in regard to this extensive corpus or to being
confined to rigid and meager reading of the richness of the stories. This dissertation will
use a transdisciplinary methodology that incorporates both history and literature in close
reading of seven Tang tales composed in the mid-to-late Tang eras (780s–early 900s), to
break the boundaries between the two generic labels, chuanqi and zhiguai, and unearth
significant configurations within these literary texts that become apparent only through
stepping across genre.
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.