Cultural Close Reading And Chuanqi Drama Study In North America(1998-2011)

The Chinese society from late Ming to early Qing presented unprecedented complexity and multiplicity. People in that age, Shi Elite in particular, therefore did undergo dramatic changes in their ideological, psychological and aesthetical values. The continuity and complexity of this historical moment as well as the ambiguity of Ru scholars’mentality have been well-documented and intricately displayed by Chuanqi drama and as a result, sinologists and literary critics in North America have long been fascinated with Chuanqi drama in late Ming and early Qing. With a cultural shift in literary criticism since the1990s and a broadened horizon, their studies of Chuanqi drama also make remarkable achievements.Based on a deliberate investigation into books, dissertations and papers on Chuanqi studies during1998to2011, this research advocates a brand-new mode of close reading of Chuanqi drama which has been practiced by North American scholars and proved productive and fruitful. This new mode, termed as Cultural Close Reading, is deep-rooted in the tradition of close reading established by New Criticism and further molded by Cultural Poetics proposed by New Historicism since the end of the20th century. Focusing on linguistic forms, rhetoric features and aesthetical styles of Chuanqi plays, it combines an intrinsic criticism of the literary text itself with an extrinsic criticism of the socio-cultural context with special emphases on inter-textual interpretation as well as contexualization. Thanks to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives in research, this cultural close reading offers us new insights into the "familiar faces" of Chuanqi canons in late Ming and early Qing and aims to explore into the hot points in contemporary studies of traditional Chinese theatre, such as cross voicing, cross gender, gender mask, self-identification and self-fashioning, etc., and how those modern critical ideas are related to the writing and circulation, reading and communication of Chuanqi drama centuries ago.This dissertation is featured by a critical research of the research made by North American sinologists and literary critics and a close reading of their cultural close reading of Chuanqi plays in late Ming and early Qing. Its research is critical because it’s far more than translation and summarization of English works on Chinese drama. Instead, it proposes a new research paradigm in nowadays American sinology and criticism of literary classics, elaborates on its theoretical background and offers case studies in different hot points. The ultimate goal of this critical research is to promote a two-way communication between Chinese and Overseas academic circles and enhance the academic autonomy of Chinese literary scholars in the long run.