Illuminating the everyday: Li Luyuan's (1707--1790) 'Qilu deng' and vernacular moral realism in the early modern Chinese novel

This thesis is the first dissertation-length study of Li Luyuan's (1701--90) Qilu deng (A Lantern for the Crossroads ) in a Western language. It offers a reassessment of the literary achievement of this relatively little known novel by linking its style---what I term its 'moral realism'---to broader developments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese literary, intellectual, and cultural history. In particular, I am interested in exploring, through the close reading of Li Luyuan's fiction, how vernacular literary expression related to other early modern methods of representing and understanding the world.; Modern critical opinion has long been hostile to the didacticism of early modern Chinese vernacular fiction, viewing it as incompatible with the 'more perfect' realization of the so-called 'realism' of the indigenously Chinese genres of the short story and the novel. Taking issue with this interpretation of Ming (1368--1644) and Qing (1644--1911) dynasty literary history, this dissertation demonstrates that, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an increased moral interest in the objects and events of everyday experience provided authors, such as Li Luyuan, with the necessary impetus to engage the complexity of their changing world through the particularizing medium of vernacular literary expression. The introduction of this dissertation sets vernacular moral realism in the various intellectual and cultural contexts suggested by recent scholarship on the 'Eurasian character' of the early modern world. Chapter 1 views Qilu deng 's moral realism as a product both of early to mid-Qing vernacular literary history and of the particular views of Li Luyuan himself. Chapter 2 considers how Li Luyuan uses the vernacular idiom to represent the connections between objects, events, and emotions so as to engender a sense of the 'complex systematicity' of his novel's fictional world. With particular reference to the valorization of renqing (human sentiment) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophical discourse, Chapter 3 focuses particular attention on how human emotions ( renqing) are represented in Qilu deng. Chapter 4 explores the connection between didactic intent and a 'rhetoric of experience' in Qilu deng, arguing that appeals to experience ground the novel's 'conventional' plot in the real-word concerns of its author.