| One of the main contributions of the Yongming period (483--93) to Chinese literary history was the invention of tonal prosody. This invention was the precursor of Regulated Verse, a new poetic genre that reached maturity in the Tang dynasty (618--907) and has remained important into modern times. Wang Rong (467--93) clearly played a major role in the rise of tonal prosody, but previous studies have done little to shed light on his contributions or the originality of his poetics. This dissertation demonstrates Wang Rong's achievements by uncovering the complexity of his tonal prosody and advances knowledge of Yongming tonal prosody in general through a revision of traditional approaches and concepts.; Despite the universally acknowledged importance of Yongming period poetics to the development of tonal prosody, the experiments of the Yongming poets have often been viewed as a failed attempt. A major reason for this is that previous studies have examined Yongming prosody from a Tang perspective, assuming that Chinese tonal prosody developed along a single track and progressed steadily toward Tang patterns, without being aware that the basic principles of Yongming prosody were different from those of the Tang. This dissertation shows that two approaches to tonal composition were jointly at work in Wang Rong's poetry: the principle of change and the principle of bifurcation.; This study begins with a biographical account of Wang Rong, which is followed by a survey of early material related to the concept of tonal prosody. The heart of the dissertation consists of a study of Wang Rong's poetic corpus. There are statistical analyses of the tones in his verse at the levels of the line, couplet, and whole poem, concentrating not only on the whether the tones are level (ping) or deflected (ze) but on what was the precise tone of each and every word. Furthermore, the relationship between the tonal patterns of various poems and their semantic organization is also examined in detail. Unlike other studies of Chinese tonal prosody, this one addresses not only tonal prosody in shi poetry but also the tonal patterns in Wang Rong's yuefu. |
