Organizer: Rania Huntington, University of Illinois
Chair: Allan Barr, Pomona College
Discussant: Kenneth J. Dewoskin, University of Michigan
Wenyan xiaoshuo (informal classical narrative) has, other than a few celebrated masterpieces, been a neglected literary genre. The reasons for this are manifold: wenyan xiaoshuo are often short, gathered in collections of daunting variety; standing on the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, they do not fit easily into modern genre categories. They include terse narrative fragments as well as elaborate novellas. Written in the "serious" classical language rather than the vernacular, they were nonetheless considered frivolous or unorthodox. Their authors, readers, and subjects spanned a broad social and educational range. Yet precisely these qualities of miscellany and genre indeterminacy make them a compelling object of research.
This panel will explore the nature and cultural use of wenyan xiaoshuo by looking at rarely studied works. Carrie Reed discusses the Tang collection Youyang zazu, examining the elements that create discord and those that maintain continuity and cohesiveness, both internally and in the context of the wenyan xiaoshuo tradition. Richard Wang explores the cultural uses of Ming erotic novellas, discussing how these examples of classical fiction were employed as primers, guidebooks, gifts, erotic toys, and literary models. Rania Huntington uses the wenyan xiaoshuo works of Qian Xiyan to consider how one late Ming literatus envisioned both the genre and his own cultural world through the tension between order and miscellany. Allan Barr will examine the versions of a single episode by five early Qing writers, exploring the historical context of the tale and its appeal to writers of the Kangxi period.
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue: The Marriage of Flavors in Duan Chengshi’s Youyang zazu
Carrie E. Reed, Middlebury College
The Youyang zazu, by Duan Chengshi (c. 800–860), is a ninth-century miscellany, a heterogeneous collection of legends and hearsay, short anecdotes, polished fictional tales, reports on natural phenomena and brief notes on a multitude of subjects, rare and mundane. It is impossible to categorize, alternately resembling zhiguai, chuanqi, travel journals, pharmacopoeia, lexicons, leishu, farmers’ manuals, Buddhist miracle tale collections, Daoist handbooks and historical biographies.
Duan himself says that his work is truly "zazu," or "varied delicacies," which, when added to the hearty yet bland usual literary diet, will make a scholar’s reading more palatable. My paper looks the place of this work in the development of the wenyan xiaoshuo genre, focusing on Duan’s efforts at maintaining the "flavors" of different kinds of earlier literature while at the same time combining them and adding new ingredients to create a new "taste."
The multiplicity of technical forms contributes to this taste, as does Duan’s eclectic approach to the strange. He alternates between heightening or maintaining the sense of the strange, and explaining or ordering it, transforming it into the familiar. The relentless juxtaposition of these incongruous treatments is one fascinating example of an attempt by Duan to mix contemporary humanistic worldviews into an older zhiguai formula; it is seeming inconsistencies like this that ironically engender much of the wonder and readability of the Youyang zazu. My paper will study elements in Youyang zazu that create "discord" (and thus heighten interest) and those that create familiarity and cohesiveness (and thus enhance comfort).
The Cultural Uses of the Ming Erotic Novella
Richard G. Wang, University of Chicago
In this paper, I will investigate the cultural uses of a group of Ming erotic wenyan novellas. In the light of Roger Chartier’s sociological approach to books, the uses of the erotic novellas signify the cultural appropriation, and convey their social functions and cultural meanings. In addition to literary entertainment, a point accepted by majority of scholars, I will pursue other uses of the novellas by readers during the late Ming-early Qing period from five perspectives. First, Ming-Qing people sometimes had utilitarian views of fiction and they treated the Ming novellas as acculturation primers. Certain parts of the novella were incorporated into popular encyclopedias as manual of love letter. Second, the Ming erotic novellas seem to have become the socialization guidebooks for the late Ming and early Qing youths by providing with stimulative examples and romantic models. Third, in the money economy of the late Ming, with their commercial as well as cultural values, the Ming erotic novellas appeared to have been used as gifts. Then, more interestingly, Ming readers consumed the novellas as erotic objects as erotic paintings and even sexual implements in women’s bedrooms for the purpose of sensual pleasure. Finally, turning back to literary domain, the Ming novellas were more commonly used as literary models or stimulators for later novelists. In this latter aspect, the Jin Ping Mei (Plum in the Golden Vase) is a good example.
A Garden of Cleverness and a Box of Swords: Qian Xiyan’s World in wenyan xiaoshuo
Rania Huntington, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
In this paper I will explore the nature of the wenyan xiaoshuo genre during a crucial moment in publishing history, the end of the Ming dynasty, through a study of Qian Xiyan (fl. 1613), an obscure but highly original and prolific author of a wide range of anecdote collections. His surviving works include a collection of anecdotes about swords from works throughout history; a work playfully correcting misunderstandings of historical stories; a group of essays reflecting on the death of his young son in terms of received knowledge about fate and the supernatural; and a categorized collection of ghost stories and tales of the strange. I will ask how these diverse interests come together to complete a portrait of his mental world on the one hand and his conception of wenyan xiaoshuo on the other. Qian lived in era preoccupied with both originality and with the repackaging, anthologizing, and categorizing of earlier written works. How do his personal efforts at division and shaping of the random fit into this context? What light do they cast on late Ming encyclopedia culture? How does he resolve the tensions between miscellany and order? What is the place of the strange among other kinds of collectible material? In his works how does information relate to entertainment, and erudition to self-expression? Qian’s individual case will illuminate a neglected aspect of Ming literary and publishing history, and Chinese literary history overall.
A Tale and its Tellers: The Case of the Stolen Silver
Allan Barr, Pomona College
Certain tales, as they circulated by word of mouth, had a way of capturing the imagination of listeners, and the multiple written accounts that survive today bear witness to the interest which they once commanded. My paper will examine this phenomenon through a detailed study of a single episode recorded by five writers of the early Qing: Li Chengzhong, Pu Songling, Wang Shizhen, and two anonymous authors whose work is excerpted in Zhao Jishi’s collection of 1696, Jiyuan ji suoji. As a Classical Chinese tale, this story comes to us in various forms, as a simple anecdotal account of a highway robbery, and as a taut narrative that pits a mysterious king against a corrupt provincial governor. I will show how historical sources help to illuminate the social and political context out of which this tale emerged, and trace its circulation among members of the elite in the last two decades of the seventeenth century. Finally, my paper explores why this tale exercised such an appeal among readers and writers in the Kangxi period. With its fusion of elements that evoke both Tang fiction and the legend of the Peach Blossom Spring, the tale’s neat structure is clearly part of the answer, but there is evidence too that the story provided a release for contemporary tensions and frustrations.
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