Playful theatricals: Performativity and theatricality in late Imperial Chinese narrative (Nai'an Shi, Guanzhong Luo, Cheng'en Wu)

This study examines sixteenth and seventeenth-century Chinese narratives using theatricality as its framework. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century China saw great cultural florescence, but also growing political, social, and intellectual insecurity. This insecurity, I argue, led late imperial writers to use xi (theater or theatricals) as a trope for conflating the theatrical and the real, juggling theatrical roles, persons, and identities, and contesting orthodoxies by challenging and appropriating sites of control and authority. The prevalent use of the trope of theater resulted in an abundance of "theatricalist texts" rife with performances, masquerades, spectacles, metamorphoses, and other theatrical forms that underscore, reflexively, the perceptual dynamics of the viewed/viewer relationship.; The theatricalist texts discussed in my dissertation include metatheatrical plays (a play-within-a-play), random essays, short stories, and two major novels (Shuihu zhuan (Outlaws of the marsh) and Xiyou ji (The journey to the West)). These texts constitute part of a theatricalist culture in which the boundaries between the virtual world of theater and the actual world are deliberately blurred, the idea of "play" aestheticized, and identity perceived as artificial, performative, and relational. Viewing theatricality as a relationship between performer, audience, and the space in which both interact, I divide my discussion, heuristically, into three parts: staging, acting, and viewing. Through these categories I discuss the complex relationship of theatricality with orthodoxy, authenticity, gender, desire, and other important late imperial issues.; Theatricality is a crucial framework for studying late imperial Chinese literature that has largely been ignored. My study of performativity and theatricality is pegged to its Chinese historical context re-emphasizing what would have been obvious to late imperial writers, commentators, and readers, that late imperial texts cannot be fully understood without reference to playful theatricals. My dissertation thus shows that theater vocabulary, concepts, and framing transformed late imperial literature into theatricalist texts that blended the boundaries between fiction and theater. This work also reveals an interesting similarity between the late imperial Chinese concept of theatricality and modern interdisciplinary theories on theater and theatricality.