Early Chinese vernacular literature and the oral-literary continuum: The example of Song and Yuan dynasties pinghua

The thesis concerns a heterogeneous group of lengthy narratives of the Southern Song (1127--1279) and Yuan (1260--1368) periods and their historical and cultural context. I attempt to establish the degree of oral and writerly imagination embodied in these texts by determining their relationship to oral storytelling by professionals and amateurs on the one side and written works of narrative fiction, theater, and historiography on the other. The concept of the "oral-literary continuum" is introduced to describe the complex interactions between storytellers, authors, editors, and audiences, and to break away from the overwhelmingly textual focus of other models.; Chapters 1 and 2 contextualize the narratives by a description of social spaces for oral-written and social interactions. I explore the participation of scholar-officials and the court in performative events and the storytellers' reliance on the literary tradition. Chapter 3 contains a reassessment of pinghua as a technical term. I conclude that pinghua was originally a genre of oral storytelling which relied heavily on literary sources, without being necessarily synonymous with "historical book" storytelling. As printed texts, they were conscious recreations of performances in which disparate materials were assembled in a continuous narrative. Chapter 4 provides concrete examples that pinghua were neither exclusively oral nor exclusively written. I contend that they are the result of literary experimentation, namely, the fusion of the oral-performative with the literary traditions. Chapter 5 generalizes about the complexity with which oral and written narrative strands interwove during the Song, Yuan, and early Ming.