My dissertation will seek to answer the question of why, despite Confucius' famous refusal to talk of the strange, the violent, the chaotic, and the supernatural (Analects 7:20), classical Chinese tales of anomalies and marvels (zhiguai XX and chuanqi XXX) were written and read. Acknowledging the genre's historical affinity with the orthodox tradition of dynastic histories, traditional and modern scholars of Chinese narrative have generally sought to understand the "strange tale" as either "bad history" or fictional creation. However, my study will bypass the problem of historicity vs. fictionality, and define the Chinese fantastic as any conscious or subconscious departure--be it epistemological, ethical, political, or aesthetic--from the orthodox Confucian perception of reality and literary propriety. In other words, the Chinese strange tale as a literary category demarcated for both the writer and the reader a safety zone within which the dominant cultural values might be toyed with, temporarily suspended, or even subverted. In order that the examples might interilluminate, they will be drawn primarily from the high Qing (Kangxi r. 1661-Qianlong r. 1796) revival of the medieval strange tale, which coincided with a time when imperial China was becoming unprecedentedly conservative in almost every facet of its culture. By focusing on four major aspects of late imperial fantasies--horror, laughter, eroticism, and lyricism--my dissertation will explore the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the Chinese strange tale. On a theoretical level, my study is an analysis and critique of the implications of the classical Chinese xiaoshuo commentary tradition and intentionalist theory, as well as Western theories of the grotesque, the carnivalesque, the Freudian "Uncanny," the literary fantastic, and gender criticism. The theoretical positions that will emerge in this enterprise should open up new avenues far the study of Chinese aesthetics, literary history, genre criticism, and fantasy literature.
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