| The fox capable of assuming human form holds a central place in the imaginative cosmos of premodern China. It stands between beast and man, the dead and the living, the monstrous and the divine. Although there was already a prolific tradition of fox stories in earlier Chinese literature, in the Ming and Qing dynasties both the quantity and diversity of these stories increased dramatically. The fox serves as a lens with which to focus on the literary and cultural history of the period from the early seventeenth through the late nineteenth century. My dissertation is structured around themes of the fox tale rather than individual authors or periods. However, Ji Yun (1724-1805), who made an unparalleled attempt to create a rational and coherent vision of the fox tradition, is a guiding voice.;All of these themes are bound together by the foxes' increasing physical, cultural, and psychic proximity to human beings. In the Qing human order has expanded to contain even creatures who were originally the embodiments of alien chaos, but the fox preserved its ambivalent nature, exposing the tendency of order to fall back into chaos, for the familiar to again become the strange.;The first chapter introduces the fox through a survey of earlier lore and two individual author's definitions. In my second chapter, I argue that the literary phenomenon is intimately related to the development of the popular cult of the fox as a protective and providing deity inhabiting people's homes. Chapter three examines the strong associations of the shape-changing fox with sexuality. In chapter four I explore how that the association of foxes with sex was converted into the vixen as romantic ideal. The fifth chapter discusses the analogical uses of fox tales to discuss human issues. The final step of the foxes' humanization, discussed in the conclusion, was their conversion into an aspect of the human mind, summoned by human desires and banished by human self-control. |
