| This project compares texts by male authors on women's kin and household relationships to illuminate the role of genre in shaping textual discourse in 17th- and 18th-century China. Through an examination of ritual texts, exemplary biographies, elegies and personal biographies, morality books, and short and long vernacular fiction, this study shows the central role of genre in mediating debates around the construction of the family, which often took place between genres rather than between individual works. Chapter One describes Ming and Qing transformations of two Han dynasty classics, the "Nei ze" chapter from the Li ji and the Lienu zhuan. These works illustrate fundamental concepts of Chinese kinship such as the relative centrality of affection (qing ) and ritual propriety (li) in negotiating particular relationships. They also exemplify the different roles of prescriptive and narrative writing in offering visions of the idealized household. Finally, they illustrate different tactics for harmonizing tensions between Han and Ming-Qing norms of behavior, including commentary and rewriting, which offer new insights on the canon-commentary discursive formation. Chapter Two focuses on morality books and funerary writing. It centers on two author/editors, Chen Hongmou (1696-1771) and Shi Chengjin (1659-sometime after 1739), reading the statements on women in each man's morality books against the elegies and biographies that he wrote for individual women of his family. The contrasts between these kinds of writing reveal the strong influence of genre on the ideas expressed in a given text: qing and li emerge as organizing principles of genre formation. Comparing the two men with each other reveals the variety of strategies they used to create textual authority, including commentary, auto-commentary, and reliance on discourses of family and official hierarchy. Chapter Three turns to fiction, presenting close readings of one story from Du Gang's vernacular collection Yumu xingxin bian (1792), and three from the anonymous collection Xingmeng pianyan, each of which transforms a classical tale from Pu Songling's (1640--1715) Liaozhai zhiyi. All four stories attempt to harmonize qing and li, and they reveal organic connections between the vernacular idiom, the short story genre, and the gendered domestic space. The latter three stories, compared with their classical sources, demonstrate the linkage between rewriting and commentary and suggest defining characteristics of the chuanqi and huaben genres. Chapter Four analyzes depictions of the women's quarters in Honglou meng and two of its earliest sequels, Hou honglou meng (1796) and Honglou fumeng (1799). The scale of the novels corresponds to the vast household scale and complexity of family relationships they portray. The sequels respond to the parent novel as literary critiques, offering competing visions of what it means to be a novel as they both emulate and revise the metafictional play of Honglou meng. Their emphasis on tight plot is mirrored in their careful restructuring of the Jia mansion and family. Their resolutions of the parent novel's romantic tragedy combine elements of the discourses of qing as romantic passion and familial affection and of li as a source of order and stability. The dissertation as a whole shows how genre mediates social conflicts; reflects on commentary, rewriting, and sequeling; and re-centers vernacular fiction within Ming-Qing print culture. |
