When high culture embraces the low: Reading Xiyou ji as popular fiction in Chinese society

This dissertation is a study of Xiyou ji, a sixteenth-century Chinese vernacular novel that has for centuries enjoyed tremendous popularity in Chinese society, among cultural elites as well as the common people. Contemporary scholars in the U.S., heavily influenced by traditional Chinese commentaries, have read Xiyou ji predominantly as a religious allegory. The allegorical readings of Xiyou ji have won the novel the recognition and respect of the polite society in pre-modern China and in the west, but there are important aspects of the novel left unexplored in this critical approach. The essential question this dissertation attempts to answer is: what makes Xiyou ji special as a literary text and how its literary features help to define Xiyou ji and the late-imperial Chinese vernacular novel in the context of Chinese literary and cultural history. Using Xiyou ji as an example, the study demonstrates the vital interaction between elite and popular culture in the writing and consumption of the Chinese vernacular novel that emerged as a literary genre to challenge and transgress cultural hierarchies in late imperial China.