Domesticity and the Emergence of the Private in Mid- to Late Tang Poetry

Abstract

This dissertation traces the first emergence of a domesticity topic in Chinese poetry during the Mid-Tang dynasty (8th–9th century). Beginning with the great Tang poet Du Fu (712–770) and proliferating among a generation of major poets after the An Lushan Rebellion (755)—including Bai Juyi, Yuan Zhen, Han Yu, and Meng Jiao —classical Chinese poetry innovated a set of shared images, motifs, and emotional affects centered on everyday life, the mundane, and the family within the setting of a personal home. Mid-Tang poets developed the domesticity theme along ideological, rhetorical, affective, and spatial axes. They also devised distinctive literary techniques to communicate the idea of the “home” in poetry. The resulting Mid-Tang poetry of domesticity challenges and reinterprets received cultural and ethical models of the family, articulates an aspect of universal human experience heretofore unseen in the lyric tradition, and facilitated the development of the premodern Chinese poet’s private persona. By identifying the advent of the “home” and of the domesticity topic in classical poetry, this project introduces a new dimension of analysis to the ongoing scholarly excavation of privacy and private life in Chinese literary and intellectual history. This study also fashions a comparative node through which the classical Chinese literary tradition becomes conversant with other premodern world literatures engaged in the idea of the home and the domestic theme. The first chapter contextualizes a pre-Tang literary landscape in which poetic engagement of themes relating to the home and family were delimited to mourning poetry for wives and children (i.e., the elegiac genres of daowang shi and aici). The second chapter taxonomizes a cast of common characters—including wives, children, concubines, and employed and enslaved domestic servants—appearing within the “home” of the Mid-Tang domestic poem. A third chapter situates this poetry of domesticity at the spatial site of the personal residence, focusing on its semantic and material potentialities as well as the positioning of the author within its boundaries. The final chapter deals with the Mid-Tang poetic home in mediated modes—e.g., in absentia, as memory, and in imagining the domestic lives of others. These important corollaries are explicated through an investigation of epistolary poetry and metatextual interaction within social-literary networks. In the field of Chinese literary history, this project introduces domesticity as a new thematic framework through which to read medieval poetry. By centering poetic subjects such as the wife and the child, this dissertation also aims to be of interest to scholars of premodern gender, social history, and the family. The first chapter contextualizes a pre-Tang literary landscape in which poetic engagement of themes relating to the home and family were delimited to mourning poetry for wives and children (i.e., the elegiac genres of daowang shi and aici). The second chapter taxonomizes a cast of common characters—including wives, children, concubines, and employed and enslaved domestic servants—appearing within the “home” of the Mid-Tang domestic poem. A third chapter situates this poetry of domesticity at the spatial site of the personal residence, focusing on its semantic and material potentialities as well as the positioning of the author within its boundaries. The final chapter deals with the Mid-Tang poetic home in mediated modes—e.g., in absentia, as memory, and in imagining the domestic lives of others. These important corollaries are explicated through an investigation of epistolary poetry and metatextual interaction within social-literary networks. In the field of Chinese literary history, this project introduces domesticity as a new thematic framework through which to read medieval poetry. By centering poetic subjects such as the wife and the child, this dissertation also aims to be of interest to scholars of premodern gender, social history, and the family.