Article Notes: Wakeman's Romantics, Stoics and Martyrs

Mao Xiang (1611-1693), one of a group of men who witnessed the Ming-Qing collapse and lived to reflect on it.

Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. "Romantics, Stoics, and Martyrs in Seventeenth-Century China." The Journal of Asian Studies 43, no. 4 (1984): 631-665. Professor Wakeman delivers a report on the consolidation of Qing rule up to roughly 1683 via the lives of a number of different men of letters who all followed roughly parallel and related paths of writing, working, and living (or dying, in a few cases of suicide).

Sundry notes, in order of their occurence in the paper and in a rough bibliographic format:


Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. "Romantics, Stoics, and Martyrs in Seventeenth-Century China." The Journal of Asian Studies 43, no. 4 (1984): 631-665.




The Peach Blossom Fan, Kong Shangren. 1976. The relationship between plays and life writing -- hm! The early Qing: satrapies, Three Feudatories (三反), 1673-1681. Take over Koxinga in 1683. 1684, consolidate control. Maunder Minimum theory of global climatic change? "The distinction drawn in the title of this article between the three groups of that seventeenth-century elite is, to a certain extent, heuristic."



Spence and Wills 1979 -- background on the early Qing to 1683, 三反. From Ming to Ch'ing



Haydn 1950, 638 "philosophies of desperation" The counter-Renaissance‎ - Page 638Hiram Collins Haydn - History - 1960 - 705 pages



Xie Guozhen, 1982, 南明史略 "moral courage" of late ming figures like Chen Zilong; his stoical self drowning, 50-52. Qian Qianyi, "the leading romantic" sybaritic laxity, "In the late Ming, terms like fengliu (style-flowing) were attached to the poetry of untrammeled lyricists such as Zhu Hao and Li Yingzhen, who were admired for their spontaneous expression of "native sensibility" (xingling) (Lynn 1975:239; Murck 1978:87-89; Yoshikawa 1970:18-21; Zhu Tan 1930:532)." also Liu Zongzhou, starved himself to death by way of protest. (on p. 640 of this paper)



Birch, Studies in Chinese Literary Genres. Liu, J. J. Y. 1974, heroic temperaments in poetry



Owen, Readings : Wang Shizhen (1634-1711) shen yun and xiong hun; Qian Qianyi was xiong-y; which one was Yang Jiang? Qian Qianyi, Li Mengyang (1472-1529), Wang Shizhen (1526-1590) classmate Li Liufang of Jiading (1575-1629), disciple of Gui Youguang (1506-1571), 



(Ch'en 1961) the three Yuan brothers (Zongdao, Hongdao and Chongdao) "flow out fresh from the heart and soul" gongan school. iconoclast Li Zhuowu (1527-1602), Wang Yangming Confucianism. Cheng Jiasui (1565-1643)...

Qian Qianyi made his own contribution to this amalgam, especially after he had given up his position as a Hanlin compiler after 1610 to return to Jiangnan to mourn the death of his father. He was known for his love of luxury and connoisseurship, and during the following decade he began to gather around him the most talented young poets and painters of the lower Yangzi delta. In his own writings on literary criticism, Qian argued not only that authentic feelings had to be experienced in personal relations connecting one individual to the next but also that the foundation of all great poetic expression was an appreciation for material substantiality, for sensually experienced "things" (wu)

The poet Mao Xiang-one of the Four Lords (Si gongzi) of the lower Yangzi, along with Fang Yizhi, Hou Fangyu, and Chen Zhenhui-has left an intentionally idealized account of a Mid-Autumn Festival banquet in 1642, when he was reunited with his concubine after she had braved river bandits in order to reach the safety of Nanjing. At Nanjing on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the fellows of our literary society from various parts of the country . . . invited us to a banquet which was spread in a pavilion at Peachleaf Ferry (Taoye shuige). Among those present were Madame Gu of Meilou and Madame Li of Hanxiuzhai, my concubine's near relatives, who had come to offer their congratulations upon her success in uniting with me. On that day the play [by Ruan Dachengi entitled The Swallow Letter ( Yanzi jian) was newly performed, full of sweet and loving pathos, and when it came to the most touching point describing the separation and reunion of the hero and the heroine, my concubine wept and so did Madame Gu and Madame Li. The meeting of a crowd of scholars and beauties amongst towers and pavilions amid a scene of smoke and water and in the bright moonlight, with melodious dramatic songs cheering up one's senses, was something to be remembered forever.

(Mao 1931:31-32)1"

Mao Xiang's concubine, Dong Xiaowan, whom he first met in 1639 when he went up to Nanjing to take the provincial examinations, was one of the most accomplished courtesans of the Qinhuai quarter; she had been trained from the age of seven by her mother in music and drama, needlework and cuisine, poetry and calligraphy. She was also one of the most beautiful women in China, so contemporaries claimed, and when Mao Xiang (whom courtesans called "the handsome shadow" txiuyingl) reached the southern capital, Fang Yizhi tried to introduce his friend to her. But Dong Xiaowan, tired of the life of a courtesan and longing to marry an accomplished gentleman, had left the carved, belanterned balustrades of Qinhuai to return to Suzhou with her mother. Mao Xiang went to see her there, but left, and for a brief period he was infatuated with another famous beauty, Chen Yuanyuan, of whom he wrote:

Nonchalant but charming,

she walked with a graceful

gait as if wafted by the wind.

Dressed in pepper

silk, she frequently

turned around

to look at her flowing skirt.

Her elegant appearance closely resembled

that of a lone phoenix fluttering

behind a screen of mist. (Mao 1931:10-11)

Chen Yuanyuan, however, was not to be his.

Qian Jibo 1935, 明代文学. Lynn (De Bary, ed. Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, 217-269) 1975 and other sources: Shen yun and xiong hun



Dennerline 1981, THe Chia-ting Loyalists. personal experiences of a Huang Chunyue, tutor in Qian estate.



Mao 1931, The Reminiscences of Tung Hsiao-wan. Wakeman's edition of Mao Xiang. [Reminiscences of the convent of shadowy plum blossoms, written "in memory of his concubine, Dong Xiaowan"]



Peterson 1979, 142. Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih Was Mao Xiang an indulgent escapist?



Hegel 1981, 175. The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China. The caizi and the jiaren. Qian Qianyi and Liu Shi. lambencies in a brilliant, shimmering age that was slowly losing its glow. 637: Qian's story, cf. Idema and Grant.



Birch 1972, 134. Wu Weiye's nostalgia, in play form? Anthology of Chinese Literature, vol 2. a reclusion pattern: initial refusal to serve. Grand Secretary Chen Mingxia. "an ambivalent decision." Ma 1935 Buddhism, the monk HOngchu, "Three Phoenixes of the Left Bank of the Yangzi"



Stoics



Wan Shouqi, at Princeton's Sackler, a hybrid figure, also Wan 1967, and again, 4:6b. cf. Tang Yin. Ideenverbindung. 节 to regulate or moderate -- great discussion of the term here. 桊 juan, caution -- another important term. Notice structurally, Wakeman's brief notes on tradition here. writing lesson for you.

The romantic idealists preferred Tang and Song expository prose models; stoical rationalists like Chen Zilong or Zhang Pu chose instead complex medieval modes of discourse (Qian Jibo 1935:66-69).



641: Seventeenth-century Confucian stoics were often both men of
letters and warriors. Yan Ermei, the popular Xuzhou poet, was as at
home on horseback as he was at the banquet table, and he served the loyalists as an officer in the military secretariat of Shi Kefa, the defender of Yangzhou.

(Pirazzoli and Hou 1973, 157-58) Wang Shouqi, cf. Tao Yuanming. Un Rouleau de Wan Shouqi: une peinture pour un poème" A scrool by Wan Shouqi: A painting for a poem. La Revue du Louvre et des musées de France. Wan Shouqi is reminiscent of Sima Qian:

His travels, which carried him back and forth across the Yellow River many times, made him unusually sensitive to the tremors of a dying empire. He saw in the river's constant flux a promise of eventual continuity with China's past:

Here divine Yu knew he held the Mandate

Once he'd seen the dragon's undulating coils.27 (Yan 1967, 5:3a)

Shi Kefa, Yangzhou, irredentist policy

Peterson, 1968, THe Life of Ku Yen-wu, HJAS. p. 149-150. Gu Yanwu's personal sense of grief. Liu Zongzhou, starved himself to death by way of protest. cf. the Qian Zhongshu preface, "On Shame."



Yan 1967, 9:29b. Yan Ermei by contrast, bedded and boarded, brittle evanescence

Wan Shouqi, who had been captured and thrown in prison at the time of the 1647

Songjiang uprising, was just such a person. After he escaped from prison, Wan

returned to Xuzhou to find his family's mansion in ruins (Yan 1967, 5:47b). He tried

to sell what he could of the few stony fields that had not been occupied or seized by

conquerers and collaborators, but got very little money from his property. To support

his wife and son, he at first relied upon marketing his calligraphy, seal carvings, and

paintings.28 Later, he bought a vegetable garden where he grew medicinal plants. "We



live in a rundown little alley, surrounded in front and in back by peasants who raise

pigs for a living. . . . I wonder what's become of those I used to argue with before:

the sage emperor, the shining prince, the loyal ministers, the righteous scholars"

(Wan 1967, 3: 10a). Early in 1646, Wan Shouqi decided to "abandon

the ephemeral world for the true Reality," and he took the Buddhist names of Huishou, Shamen

huishou, and Mingzhi daoren (Wan 1967, 3:29b-30a). But his new attachments as a

Buddhist did not keep him from eating meat or drinking alcohol, and his con-

temporaries saw him as a hybrid figure.

Martyrs

Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. 
Professor Frye throws his mind against the literature of "Western" and "Classical" ages. He comes up with a set of "modes" that broadly matches against certain stages of history -- the classical era, the middle ages, the Renaissance, the 17th through 19th centuries, and the 20th century. Overall, for example, literature has tended to become more and more ironic, which is to say in its most basic sense less and less concerned with the Gods and more and more concerned with humans and their foibles.

: 39-42. Tragic modes.



In 青人杂剧初集 续离骚 Ji Yongren, 1931-1934: 2a, Fan Chengmo, who looked to Qu Yuan, and Ji Yongren. Zheng Zhenduo's preface. Governer Ma Xiongzhen, the neoclassicism of the High Qing during the following century. back to public performance in the early Qing. note the theme of Wen Tianxiang. The murder of Ma Xiongzhen. mass suicide by the women of the lineage. Biographical plays: Guilin shuang. Guilin frost. capture of the popular imaginations -- intimate publics?



imposed trajectories.



Giles A Chinese Biographical Dictionary. 1962, 857, Wei Jie the jewel, romanticism 实真明士自风流



清代文学批评资料汇编 [Collection of materials on Qing literary criticism] Wu Hongyi and Ye Chongbing, comps. 香草亭 传奇序 Preface to the play Eupatory Pavillion. Li Yu, 1979b: 106, Li Yu's play about Fan Chengmo



Su Xuelin, 1970. 中国文学史. hm!