Travels, Dreams and Collecting of the Past: A Study of “Qiantang Meng” (A Dream by Qiantang River) in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

• Other Authors: Wu, Siyuan (Author)
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Literature; Art history
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.45556

abstract: 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. === Dissertation/Thesis === Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2017