The game of marginality: Parody in Li Yu's (1611--80) vernacular short stories (China)

This dissertation studies the dynamic between literary tradition and literary innovation in Li Yu's (1611-80) huaben xiaoshuo (short vernacular fiction). Situating the fiction in the context of Li's self-representation, pursuit of patronage, and the literati reading community, Li consciously participated in a variety of literary and cultural discourses of his time. Specifically, I argue that his vernacular stories should be read as parodies that deliberately manipulate literary conventions, cultural stereotypes, and readers' expectations.; Chapter 1 reviews recent scholarship on Li and introduces my critical approaches. A self-conscious parodist, Li fashioned himself as socially marginal, but his fiction always targeted the social and cultural elite, who had the education needed to understand his parody. Chapter 2 examines how Li's fiction can be read as metafiction, or "stories about stories." His fiction overuses the conventions of huaben to mock the "aesthetic transcendences" that early Qing writers created to deal with their memories of the fall of the Ming dynasty. Chapter 3 analyzes Li's parody of the seventeenth-century romantic discourse. His fiction not only twists the formulae of the caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty) trope but also deflates the cultural ideals of qing (human attachment). Moreover, Li's romantic comedy parodies the image of tragic heroines in order to mock an important mode of the Chinese literati's literary expression---identifying with a tragic heroine through whose voice the male literati express their own career frustration. Chapter 4 focuses on the readership of Li's parody. I categorize four types of readers' response to parody and show how his ideal reader, Du Jun (1611-87) echoes parody by willingly misreading his fiction. I also suggest how Li's roles as reader and commentator of fiction could have been meaningfully linked to his parody.; The dissertation concludes with a brief consideration of the "escapist" nature of Li's parody. Parody allows the author to play with his self-claimed social marginality, to distance himself from the burden of representing traumatic political and social realities, and to provide to his readers a literary experience free from the concerns of those realities.