The dilemma of Chinese lyricism and the Qing literati novel

This dissertation is a study of two of the best known traditional Chinese novels, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) and The Scholars (Rulin waishi), both of which were written in the eighteenth century. It is not intended to be an in-depth examination of Chinese lyricism per se (as it is expressed in Chinese lyric poetry) but an investigation of how some of the basic assumptions of this lyricism find their expression in the context of a novel's extended narrative. It studies Chinese lyricism mainly as a form of literati ideology and concentrates on its ideological implications. A main argument of this study is that by the eighteenth century (when traditional Chinese civilization was waning) the dilemma inherent in Chinese lyricism--the tension between its formal desire for harmony and the increasingly chaotic reality to contain and to respond to--began to become increasingly visible.;The dissertation begins with a historical account of the unfolding of this dilemma in the larger context of Chinese intellectual history and then proceeds to trace the rise of lyricism in the traditional novel. Among the issues dealt with in details in the subsequent chapters are various lyrical tactics adopted in these two novels (e.g. spatial structures which resemble the structure of Chinese lyric poetry and images of garden), the question of how self-expression is pursued when the lyrical tradition begins to present itself as a overwhelming burden, the allegorical use of female personae for voicing male authors' anxiety (an old convention of Chinese lyricism) and the rising autobiographical tendencies in these two eighteenth-century novels. In the conclusion, a brief comparison of these two Chinese novels with some of the lyrical novels in the West is made in order to put the study in a comparative perspective.;Another purpose of this dissertation is to isolate some newly-emerged features in these two fictional works so that a better understanding of the eighteenth-century Chinese novel as a whole can be reached--to formulate some answers to the complex question of what was happening to the traditional Chinese novel during the eighteenth century, an important period during which this genre is generally considered to have reached its apex.