History, romance, and identity: Wu Weiye (1609--1672) and his literary legacy

This dissertation explores history, romance and personal identity in the work of Wu Weiye, a master poet of late imperial China. Wu's sequence of narrative songs concerning the Ming-Qing dynastic succession has exerted an immense influence both on our understanding of dynastic history and on the themes and styles of subsequent Chinese narrative verse. Despite a general recognition of Wu's status as a major Qing poet, literary scholars have tended to neglect late imperial Chinese poetry; meanwhile moral absolutists have regarded Wu's political allegiance to two dynasties as an indelible stain on his literary output. My dissertation examines Wu's place in the Chinese narrative tradition through a tripartite approach of motif study, genre study and influence study.; While confined to a single author, my dissertation provides new insights into literary relations, in particular issues of influence, intertextuality and innovation. Attempting to redress the balance regarding China's alleged dearth of narrative poetry, I argue that Wu's lyrics create a new literary space that filters extensive historical narratives through the poet's lyric subjectivity. An inquiry into Wu, a true developer of the Tang masters, sheds new light on the afterlife of Tang poetry. At the same time, many of Wu's poems borrow elements from contemporary chuanqi tales and drama, and in turn have exerted influence on later fiction and theatre. By exploring the unprecedented diversity and intermingling of literary genres during the Qing Dynasty, this study challenges the widely held assumption about the absolute primacy of one or two particular genres in each period and instead paints a more balanced and nuanced picture of late imperial literature.; The dissertation consists of an introduction, four chapters and three appendixes. Chapter 1 discusses Wu's war poems and the Chinese tradition of poetry as witness to historical trauma. Chapter 2 discusses Wu's romance narratives and the Chinese discourse on "creatures of enchanting beauty." Chapter 3 examines Wu's fictionalized biography "Liu Jingting zhuan" and its transmission. The concluding chapter traces the critical and creative reception of Wu's poetry in China and Japan. The appendixes translate critical reviews of Wu's oeuvre and chart imitations of Wu's poetry.