| This dissertation studies the short vernacular fiction, a narrative form that emerged in the mid-16th century and flourished from 1620s to 1650s, in the context of print culture and the rise of vernacular literature. I argue that this narrative form from its very beginning demonstrated literati writers' self-conscious play of literary conventions, by constructing intertexual relationships between the short stories and with more established genres such as classical tales and plays and by tracing how the story writers manipulated "reading" and "readers" both inside the narratives and in paratexts and how they played with the concept of authorship. For the socially often marginalized literati, the writing of fiction, because of its playful facade, pushed further their endeavor to reconstruct self and society. Taking close reading as the major approach in this study, my analysis is also inspired by Western theories in reading and in cultural studies.; The body of this dissertation includes four chapters. Chapter 1 is a study of Qingpingshan tang huaben the earliest extant collection. I argue that the diverse modes of narrative displayed by these stories indicate the editor's attempt to appeal to a broadening audience with different tastes. There appears an authorial tendency of using female characters and domestic stories to parody historical and heroic narratives.; Chapter 2 deals with Feng Menglong (1574-1646) and his Sanyan collections that came out in the 1620s and marked the maturation of the short vernacular fiction. I argue that the ideal of qing (desire, love, passion, feeling, sentiment, etc) significantly shaped Feng's editorial strategies and his vernacular revisions. Feng's juxtaposition and manipulation of multi-leveled readings challenge his ostensible didactic narrative and demonstrate a more explicit authorial self-consciousness in writing.; In Chapter 3, I focus on the aesthetic of qi (strange) and fantastic motifs of dream and metamorphosis that characterize the stories by Langxian and Ling Mengchu (1580-1644). As the first distinct "authors" rather than "editors" of stories, both Ling Mengchu and Langxian play with the didactic convention by foregrounding the fictional nature of their narratives.; Chapter 4 examines the making of romance and meta-fictional narratives in the stories by Li Yu (1611-1680). Li Yu's attempt to intellectualize the pleasure of reading partakes in the Qing literati's reflexive thinking on qing and its devastating power that presumably caused the fall of Ming.; To conclude this study, I discuss briefly several minor collections in the context of reading and further theorize the interrelation between reading, authority, and didacticism that significantly shaped short vernacular fiction. |
