The Poetics of Miscellaneousness: The Literary Design of Liu Yiqing's Qiantang Yishi and the Historiography of the Southern Song.

Abstract

In spite of its importance in the study of Song (960-1279) literature and historiography, the value of biji (notebooks) has not yet been fully explored. Much existing scholarship on Song history and literature has made use of biji as a source of information. But little has been done to examine how the special literariness of the genre of biji may enhance or even alter our conception of the past. Focusing on the literary design of a 13th-14th century Chinese biji titled Qiantang yishi (Anecdotes of Qiantang), this dissertation explores how the perpetual dialectic between the text’s miscellaneous surface and internal coherence significantly enriches our understanding of Song history and historiography.

Believed to have been written/compiled by a Southern Song (1127-1279) loyalist Liu Yiqing (fl. late 13th - early 14th century), Qiantang yishi chronicles the political, military, and cultural reasons behind the fall of the dynasty. While the text’s miscellaneous appearance may make it look like nothing more than a simple collection of historical material, what this miscellaneousness actually embodies is a special type of poetics, designed by Liu Yiqing to articulate his literary conception, historical vision, and loyalist concerns of the past. Through this miscellaneousness, the text reveals its very structure and order. But at the same time, this miscellaneousness destabilizes the meaning of the text, and opens the text to different possibilities of reading. This dissertation starts with a brief introduction of the literary features, historical development, and scholarly studies of the genre of biji. It then proceeds to Chapter One to examine the historical, cultural, and literary contexts, in which and through which the making and reading of Qiantang yishi become possible. Chapter Two provides a formal analysis of one of the most distinct literary features of the text, namely, its formless form. Chapter Three contains a comprehensive thematic study of the text, and compares the text to a symphony of discordance that invites different interpretations. The last chapter focuses on the poems in the text, which serve as the “poetic eyes” that enable us to both look into as well as to look beyond the text.