Quasi-History and Public Knowledge: A Social History of Late Ming and Early Qing Unofficial Historical Narratives

In this dissertation I analyze the print cultural characteristics of quasi-historical narratives produced in late Ming and early Qing China (from roughly 1550 to 1700). Quasi-histories include the genres yeshi (unofficial histories), novels on current events, and dramas on current events. Works containing unofficial historical narratives experienced an unprecedented increase in popularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (particularly in the novel format). Quasi-histories were produced very quickly after important historical events and synthesized rumors and innuendo with official documents and reports. They played a key role in how information moved into the public consciousness. Readers approached quasi-histories, and yeshi in particular, with great anxiety. Yeshi appear to form an ill-defined, amorphous genre that is in some ways analogous to official histories and in others to novels. This dissertation contextualizes these works within late Imperial intellectual production to bring a clearer understanding of these complicated and understudied textual entities. I bring several new methodological tools to bear on an issue that necessitates a research approach that combines traditional reading with modern digital analysis. I begin this dissertation by closely reading the quasi-historical representations of the infamous eunuch Wei Zhongxian, who nearly usurped the Ming throne in the 1620s. After his death in 1627, a rush of yeshi, novels, and dramas were produced that presented diverse explanations of his origins and death. These works formed a web of interrelated texts clearly focused on establishing historical authority. They borrowed extensively from each other, official documents, and circulating rumors to construct an influential image of Wei. In chapter two, I use the extensive metadata on late Imperial texts available in online library catalog records to study trends in late imperial printing. In chapter three, I leverage this technique to understand how quasi-histories relate to the larger print cultural picture developed in chapter two. The fourth chapter engages with new experimental techniques borrowed from the digital humanities field "stylometry." Primarily used in authorship analysis, I use this technique to situate the style of yeshi among the novels with which they are so often confused. The fifth and final chapter places these quasi-histories in the wider field of intellectual production by looking at the various epistemological approaches that led readers to consider yeshi as novels in the first place. Those that valued source above all else encourage the understanding that yeshi should be classified as novels. Readers who focused on the poetics consider the two genres very distinct. I then connect yeshi with official historical biographies using stylometry. In this manner, the reasons why yeshi cause so much anxiety become clearer. I finish the chapter by looking at the news and history-bearing characteristics of these works and discussing why they were able to influence historical understanding.