'The Peony Lantern' and fantastic tales in late imperial China and Tokugawa Japan: Local history, religion, and gender

This dissertation examines the transnational and local circulation and interpretation of Qu You's (1347--1433) New Tales for the Trimmed Lampwick (Jiandeng xinhua) in late imperial China and Tokugawa Japan. This early Ming collection of ghost tales was one of the most popular Chinese texts in early modern East Asia. Through focusing on "The Peony Lantern," one of the tales from the collection, my dissertation reveals the dynamics between the text's uncanny heroines and writers from various social, cultural, and religious backgrounds in the two societies. Each chapter focuses on a distinctive group of reader-writers---popular authors of the Ming period, the local literati in Ningbo, Zen Buddhist scholar-monks of the Edo period, and an eighteenth-century Japanese female intellectual---and discusses their multifarious engagements with Qu You's ghost tales. The first half of my dissertation contextualizes "The Peony Lantern" within late imperial China's cultural and social history---the literary imagination of lamps and the return of the dead in Ming popular culture, and local politics over the devout Buddhist sisters of the Huxin Temple in Yin County, Ningbo. The second half rethinks the readership of New Tales in Tokugawa Japan. Annotations by early modern Japanese monks uncover how Qu You's ghost tales were textually tied to the Zen Buddhist text The Gateless Barrier (Wumen guan) in conveying religious messages, whereas Arakida Reijo's adaptation of "The Peony Lantern" reveals her sensibility as a woman writer.