This dissertation examines the relationship between qing and the development of Chinese fictional narrative from the late Ming (early to mid-seventeenth century) to the turn of the millennium. Qing is understood as a historically constructed Chinese concept of feelings and emotions, a concept that is inherently divisive, caught in between personal expressions of feelings---particularly romantic love---and socio-political articulations of moral norms. One of the basic theses of this dissertation is that qing's inner dynamics between the moral and the erotic helped shape up modern Chinese fiction. The struggles between moral teachings and erotic desire are frequently manifested in various textual traces; authors of fictional representation of qing make these traces visible by pointing to their own flaws in textual incongruities and rigid moral appeals or excessive sensual details, thereby exhibit a literary and linguistic self-consciousness typical of the modern age. This dissertation thus focuses on locating these textual traces through reading six works or subgenres of fiction: early Qing scholar-beauty romances associated with Tianhuazang zhuren; Guwangyan , an eighteenth-century pornographic novel; Han Bangqing's Haishanghua, a late nineteenth-century "courtesan novel"; Xu Zhenya's Yuli hun, a sentimental novel in the early Republican period; Zhang Henshui's Tixiao yinyuan, a romantic novel of the 1930s; and, finally, short stories and novels by Ye Zhaoyan, a contemporary writer with a clear awareness of traditional modes of writing qing . |