Tales of wit and enlightenment : laughter and humor in Northern Song (960-1127) China
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines notions of play, wit, and cognate concepts that are broadly pertaining to laughter and humor in premodern China. The Northern Song (960-1127) period witnessed significant enrichment to Chinese literati culture brought by scholar-officials' adoption of laughter and humor in their writings. This dissertation aims to disambiguate the popularity of laughter and humor in the Northern Song literati culture by revealing two important factors. The first factor is the rise of miscellany writing (biji, shihua, and other anecdotal genres) as a new mode of literary expression. The second factor is that Buddhism, through the Chan movement, was more deeply integrated into Chinese society. This dissertation demonstrates how laughter and humor played important roles in negotiating literati's identities, precipitating intellectual breakthroughs, and reconciliating conflicting stances. I focus on two important topics—Chinese literary criticism and literati-Buddhist interaction—in which representations of laughter help define the Northern Song achievements in synthesizing torrents of socio-political and religious changes. The dialectic of laughter emerged in these contexts as an overarching theme: caught between contradicting ideas of elegance and vulgarity, subversion and reverence, friendship and enmity, literati recurrently resorted to laughter to harmonize their dilemmatic stances in their attitudes towards literary writing, associations with Buddhist monks, and social interactions with their bureaucratic peers.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Rao, Xiao |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Egan, Ronald, 1948- |
| Thesis advisor | Egan, Ronald, 1948- |
| Thesis advisor | Kieschnick, John, 1964- |
| Thesis advisor | Zhou, Yiqun, 1971- |
| Degree committee member | Kieschnick, John, 1964- |
| Degree committee member | Zhou, Yiqun, 1971- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Xiao Rao. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Xiao Rao
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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