The discourse of romantic love in ninth century Tang China

This dissertation is a structural and historical study of Tang romance. During the ninth century, a discursive culture of romance developed in tandem with the emergence of a vibrant, young urban community fascinated by romantic encounters. Members of this community participated in the new discourse of romance by writing, sharing, and critiquing romantic stories. Moreover, the values associated with this culture of romance changed the way that literati thought of themselves and each other. A new category, the "romantic lover," soon evolved to become one of the most important modes of literati self-fashioning. In this dissertation, I analyze the generic conventions and rhetorical strategies of romantic discourse as expressed in the poetry, anecdotes, and classical tales of the ninth century. I also examine how contemporary writers and readers participated in the new culture of romance and, in particular, how they imagined such personas as the "romantic lover" and "man of sensibility" as cultural identities. This dissertation includes four chapters. Chapter one, "Structure," studies ninth century love poems and narratives as a repertoire of romantic expression defined by a common "grammar" (e.g. structures, formulae, and rules), with each text--poem or narrative, straightforward or complex, natural or supernatural--as a single realization of this shared "grammar," mediated by genre and the characteristics of an individual author. Chapter two, "Rhetoric," analyzes the formulae and variations of three shared themes in ninth century romantic literature and examines what motivated ninth century writers to write differently about romantic relationships between men and women. Chapter three, "Problem," discusses how ninth century writers treated the conflict between the "new" romantic code and the "old" social code: while the former emphasized shared feelings, equality, and freedom of choice, the latter stressed the denial of self and respect for hierarchy. Chapter four, "Identity," studies the ninth century emergence of identities based on romantic sentiment by examining three mid- and late-Tang funerary inscriptions, each of which celebrates a person's romantic sentiment and/or the romantic sentiment felt by others for that person.