The allusive manufacture of men in Chinese and Latin literature

This dissertation examines the restoration of kinship in three texts from Chinese and Roman literature. Reading these tales through intertexts and through their mythical/anthropological context, this dissertation argues for collapsing the distinction between culture and aesthetic practice.;Constructing elite male identity by the liminal courtesan, Bo Xingjiaˇn's 9th c. chuanqi fiction entitled the "Tale of Li Wa" ("Li Wa zhuan") employs intertexts with Wenxuaˇn and the Confucian scriptures to create a discursive space within a narrative structure that covertly encapsulates a rite de passage and a rite d'institution. These literary and ritual interactions transform transgressive discourses on gender and Tang Dynasty elite identity into an aesthetic affirming social order. If the aesthetic is constituted by the social, the social is aesthetically constituted. From the origin in seasonal ritual, Claudian's 4th c. epic De Raptu Proserpinae (The Rape of Persephone) recasts the Greek myth as a Girardian displacement of cosmic, fraternal strife to Persephone. By framing the Ovidian generic interplay of masculine epic and feminine elegy in the uniquely Late Antique epithalamium, Claudian constructs for Hades and Persephone mutually constitutive gender identity.;Reading narratives through ritual patterns raises the question of when and how to allegorize, which is explored through the chuanqi drama attributed to Xu Zhen (14th c.), Killing a Dog (Shagoˇuji). Exploring this play diachronically through folklore, anthropology, and law reveals that the central question of kinship is really a response to the human condition of mortality, as confirmed by an allusion in the 16th c. novel Plum in a Golden Vase. In the Late Ming redaction of the play, however, what appears highlighted is the metatheater that asserts the social distinctions of literati identity while affirming the organicity of the society as a whole.