Shuihu zhuan (water margin) as elite cultural discourse: Reading, writing and the making of meaning (China)

This study seeks to evaluate the cultural significance involved in the writing and reading of traditional Chinese fiction (xiaoshuo), with the sixteenth-century work Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin) as a paradigmatic text. The focus is on how meaning is produced through the complex interactions between the text and its ever changing contexts. I first survey the theorizing of fiction by literati critics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with focus on the strategies they used to not only promote fiction, but also enhance their own status as elites by manipulating the cultural roles associated with the writing and reading of fiction. By designating fiction as a popular discourse, the literati accorded the genre with a special license to be unorthodox and subversive, which legitimized their use of it to voice their own discontent.; The main part of the study is devoted to an examination of the issues of kingship, loyalty and rebellion as delineated in the Shuihu zhuan , and as discussed in the commentaries written by literati commentators. Through the writing of commentaries, the commentators produce a meta-discourse in which they discuss important cultural and ideological issues.; My study also investigates the new significance imposed upon the Shuihu zhuan in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and examine several historical moments at which the novel was re-evaluated and re-interpretated against the background of new ideologies and political agendas in the cultural and literary transformations in China's modernization.