Two authorial rhetorics of Li Yu's, 1611-1680, works, inversion and auto-communication

grantor: University of TorontoThe prologue explores Li Yu's mode of innovation. A comparison is drawn between Tao Qian's giving birth to Chinese autobiography and Li Yu's decisive impact on shaping subjective and self-reflexive mode of writing in both fiction and drama. Li Yu's mode of innovation is described as establishing a dialectical relationship with the tradition, by rejecting it and at the same time renewing it. The first chapter examines Li Yu's view on literary creativity. Li Yu's literary principle is characterized as "to create but not transmit"--a reversal of the Confucian creed "to transmit but not create." The significance of this principle is addressed and its historical perspective is probed. Li Yu's theory of creativity is reconstructed from three aspects: his understanding of creative personality, his discussion of the process of literary creation, and the self-conscious authorial voice he projected in his works. The second chapter conducts a concrete literary analysis of the thematic inversions (or fan'an wenzhang) appearing in both Li Yu's fictional and dramatic writings. The concept of fan'an wenzhang is defined in Chinese cultural context and is compared to the Western notion of parody. Li Yu's thematic fan'an is found in three major staples of Chinese literature: love, morality, and retribution. Metamorphosis, role switching, and duplicity in characterization are identified as the literary devices that produce these thematic inversions. The third chapter deals with the issue of auto-communication. The concept of metafiction is brought up in discussing Chen Chen's Shuihu houzhuan, Dong Yue's Xiyou bu and Jin Shengtan's version of Xixiang ji. The integration of narrative text and critical text, the interaction between the two, and the dual role of author-cum-critic played by the writer in these three literary pieces are found even more prominently pronounced in all three genres of Li Yu's literary writing. The epilogue looks into the impact of Li Yu's innovation. In light of Western modern and post-modern theories of parody, Li Yu's works are considered instrumental in moving Chinese narrative toward a metanarrative art.Ph.D