AGAINST CULTURE: PROBLEMATIC LOVE IN EARLY EUROPEAN AND CHINESE NARRATIVE FICTION

The present study seeks to establish the centrality of the theme of problematic love in the early stages of European and Chinese narrative fiction, specifically in the twelfth-century courtly literature of France and the ch'uan-ch'i (tales of the marvelous) of the T'ang Dynasty (618-906).;Chapter 1 introduces my thesis and sketches the social and ideological background of the two cultures which were epitomized in the European knight and the Chinese scholar as cultural heroes. Since this is a comparative study, I also propose some methodological guidelines which advocate a contextual, holistic, and philological approach.;Chapter 2 is a paradigmatic survey of problematic love in earlier literature. I have chosen as paradigms the epic and elegiac poetry of the West and the lyric and narrative poetry of China. Besides providing a diachronic context for the problematic love fiction, this survey also illustrates how the theme of love is entangled with other overriding cultural concerns and how it gradually gains prominence.;Chapter 3 demonstrates the problematic relationship between sexual love and dominant culture in two sets of seminal texts, the Abelard-Heloise corpus and the "Ying-ying chuan." I first focus on the conflict between love and culture in the intellectual lovers, Abelard and Scholar Chang, especially in their failure to come to grips with their own sexuality. I then turn to the (equally intellectual) heroines, Heloise and Ying-ying, for a classic confrontation of sexual perspectives, especially in their intriguing personalities and their strategies of dealing with their problems. Both ill-fated couples find partial and unsatisfactory solutions in the dominant culture.;I define the nature of the problematic as the confrontation between sexual love and culture. I identify problematic love in fiction by the appearance of conflicts, interruptions, or incongruities at three levels. At the level of the narrative world (chiefly that of the lovers) the problematic is created by a tension or conflict between individual desires and social constraints, between sexual perspectives, between interpersonal relationships, or between conflicting inner forces within the individual himself. At the level of the author/narrator, the problematic resides in the gap between stated intention and actual performance, or between established conventions (social and literary) and the author's conscious manipulation of them. At the level of the representation of human reality, sexual love's problematic confrontation with culture in narrative fiction causes the emergence of multiple perspectives which furnish an ever fuller representation of human reality.;Chapter 4 analyzes problematic love in Marie de France's lais and a wide range of T'ang ch'uan-ch'i love stories. As dictated by its shared interest in the marvelous and problematic love, the chapter is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the function of the otherworldly setting in problematic love fiction; the second studies problems brought about by changes in an entirely human setting. I examine the lais and ch'uan-ch'i in pairs in order to sharpen the different configuration of the dialectical relationship between love and culture in them.;The concluding chapter sums up my findings, evaluates my methodology, and offers suggestions for future research in problematic love in the longer genres, the romance and the chu-kung-tiao.