China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Karin Myhre, Swarthmore College
Qitao Guo, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
This paper is an attempt to study Confucian ideology as culture and culture as history. The focus is on the arguably most important and popular genre of ritual opera, Mulian, and how its Confucian transformation that transpired in sixteenth-century Huizhou reflected the rise of a new distinctive value system, or what I call "popular Confucianism." The large-scale performance of Mulian, the main storyline of which is concerned with the monk Mulian’s descent into Hell to rescue his sinful mother, is in this study linked to the social economy and cultural traditions of Huizhou, a southern Anhui prefecture which emerged in the sixteenth century as a stronghold of Confucian lineage culture and a "merchant cradle." The new Huizhou Mulian, a Confucianized version of a tradition originally associated principally with Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religion, I will argue, was a lineage discourse. It was mainly local lineage elite, including both the gentry and the newly emerging "Huizhou merchants," who sponsored the entertaining but didactic Mulian to convey both the age-old orthodox norms and those characteristic of the sixteenth century, such as the Confucianized mercantile ethics and the newly emphasized ideal of female chastity. Finally, this paper will demonstrate that the ethico-religious discourse of Huizhou Mulian—conveying Confucian values by means of the "demons and gods" of a syncretized popular pantheon—was by no means an isolated phenomenon. There was a sweeping, well-orchestrated "popular Confucianism movement" that was going on in the sixteenth-century context of intense socioeconomic and cultural changes.
Jing Shen, Washington University
Chuanqi is a literary and musical southern dramatic form of flexible length that dominated the Chinese theater throughout the Ming and early Qing periods, roughly from the late fifteenth century to early eighteenth century. Most extant drama commentaries of that period focus on the chuanqi genre or compare it with other dramatic genres to highlight its special qualities. Even though traditional Chinese drama criticism is a field that has not been fully explored, my focus here is on one major type and its major representative work.
In this paper, I will discuss one type of classical Chinese drama criticism to explore the Ming conception of what constitutes a good play and the criteria for assessment. To that end I will analyze the "ranking" form of drama criticism represented by Lü Tiancheng’s (1580–1618) Qupin (Evaluation of Plays) printed during the late Ming period, the earliest treatise on chuanqi dramatists and plays of the Ming. By grading and evaluating the dramatic works, Lü Tiancheng endorses a model of creative naturalness which does not explicitly display traces of craftsmanship. Although his evaluative principles take staging into consideration, Lü’s comments on individual plays indicate that his criticism is concentrated on composition of drama in terms of literary language and prosodic rules. The major accomplishment of Qupin lies in its adaptation of poetry, painting and calligraphy evaluation systems to form drama criticism. I will adopt a comparative perspective to explore the origins of the relevant concepts in Chinese poetry, painting and calligraphy aesthetics in order to enhance our understanding of the terminology and methodology of Chinese drama criticism. I will do analytical and critical reading instead of theorization since classical Chinese drama criticism is distinct from the modern, western, sense of criticism and theory. This reading will demonstrate Lü Tiancheng’s efforts to systematize drama criticism through well-organized classifications and will explain its critical terminology.
Dietrich Tschanz, Princeton University
Discussions of early Qing drama focus mostly on two plays: Hong Sheng’s Changsheng dian (Palace of Eternal Youth, 1688) and Kong Shangren’s Taohua shan (Peach Blossom Fan, 1699). Although this focus is justified by the exceptional quality and long-lasting influence of these two plays, it overlooks another major play of the period, Wu Weiye’s Moling chun (Springtime in Moling, 1653), that arguably captures best the atmosphere of the post-conquest era and laid the foundations for the two later plays. In my paper, I will focus on the motif of the displaced musician which is common to all three plays and will show how this motif is developed and to what use it is put in each individual play. I will argue that the three playwrights use this motif, among other things, to convey the fragile character of the cultural enterprise of which their art is part. That is why there is always a sense of an imminent loss and an elegiac mood whenever the musicians in the three plays enter the scene. The analysis of this motif will make clear why Wu Weiye’s play occupies a pivotal position in early Qing drama and adds considerably to our understanding of the two later plays.
Richard G. Wang, University of Chicago
The late Ming tongsu leishu (popular reference books) or fiction/drama miscellanies were popular and circulated widely. Their publishing history as a case demonstrates how Ming publishing and the print culture heralded new tastes and genres. In this study, I will only discuss the late Ming fiction miscellanies such as the Guose tianxiang (Celestial Beauties), Xiugu chunrong (Spring in the Splendid Valley), Wanjin qinglin (Myriad Brocades of the Sentimental Forest), Yanju biji (A Miscellany for Leisured Hours) [three different editions], and Yanqing yishi (Forgotten Accounts of Erotic Love).
Among the extant fiction miscellanies, two text systems can easily be distinguished. I will name them the Early texts and the Later texts according to their dates and contents. These miscellanies are interrelated through trade or piracy, in particular in the case of the Yu familial linkage. They were either published in Nanjing or in Jianyang, the two most important commercial publishing centers of the time. Most of them, especially the Guose tianxiang and the Yanju biji, have many reprints. By tracing their publishing and reprinting history throughout the late imperial China, we can understand how these fiction miscellanies were produced and reproduced, were accepted and consumed in terms of the circulation of the new ideas and tastes.