published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

This dissertation examines the cultural dilemma that Chinese intellectuals are forced to confront with between tradition and Western Scholarship in Late Imperial and Modern China. As a traditional poet and scholar, Huang Jie (1873-1935) believed that the Manchurian reign was the reason for China’s collapse during Late Qing Era, and Chinese traditional culture would be the only remedy for the rapidly decaying society. Therefore, Huang initiated the campaign named “Nationality Conservation” in the aim of overthrowing the Manchu Empire. While sticking to “conservative” values, Huang adopted foreign/ Western cultural concepts and attempted to rephrase them with Chinese scholarship. All these endeavors had made Huang’s cultural identity confusing. Hence, this dissertation attempts to deal with Huang Jie’s understanding of culture through analyzing his poetry writings and poetic studies. Immersed by Confucian doctrines about the relationship between poetry and politics, Huang paid special attention to the cultural cultivating function of classical poetry. This ideology of “Cultivation through Poetry” was specifically generated from the Mao Shixu in Eastern Han Dynasty, and then repeatedly expressed in Huang’s poetic works in order to change the corrupt Modern society. In spite of this, Huang still respected and paid serious attention to the literariness of poetry, either in poetry writings or poetic studies. He spent great efforts on the prosody and therefore was well commended among Late Qing and Early Republican poets. Hence, this dissertation thoroughly examines how Huang Jie negotiated the tension between political and literary aspects of classical poetry. After introducing his life history and the ideology of “Cultivation through Classical Poetry”, chapter two and three focus on themes and characteristics of Huang’s poetry. These two chapters explore how Huang established his own poetic style under the trend of Song Poetry Movement commencing from Late Qing. The last chapter investigates Huang’s view on the evolution of literature and focuses on his abundant studies of classical poetry. In the conclusion, this dissertation would like to demonstrate that as a poet and scholar, Huang Jie established the traditional cultural identity, same as his friends in Nanshe, while his faith of “Cultivation through classical poetry” was well challenged at that tumultuous Modern time. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Wang Tao (1828-1897) had significant contributions in various fields, including the press, education and translation. He spared no effort to introduce advanced western ideas to China. These contributions and his dramatic life aroused the interest of scholars. In recent years, scholars noted the achievements of his fiction-writing and and published a large number of papers on this topic. However, his achievements in poetry-writing did not receive much attention. In order to fill this gap, the present thesis focuses on Wang Tao’s poetry-writing, aiming to give a comprehensive survey of his poems written before his exile to Hong Kong in 1862. The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one illustrates the research background, the scope of the study and the research methodology employed. Chapter two is an analytical account of Wang Tao’s life with particular emphasis on how important events in his life influenced the styles of his poems. Chapter three illustrates Wang Tao’s concept of poetry-writing. Chapter four discusses the contents, artistry and styles of Wang’s poems in the specified period. Chapter five is the conclusion. It sums up the characteristics of Wang Tao’s early poetry and gives a critical account of the comments made by various reviewers. Wang Tao claimed that the style of his early poems was soft and plaintive（側媚）. It became “wild and unrestrained” （豪放粗獷）after he had experienced serious mishaps in his life. This drastic change has been fully addressed in the thesis. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

My dissertation takes the social and symbolic location of women---the inner chambers [guige or gui]---as a point of departure to examine Ming-Qing women's unique approach to the writing of poetry. In Ming-Qing China, women continued to be assigned to the inner, domestic sphere by Confucian social and gender norms. The inner chambers were not only a physically and socially bounded space within which women were supposed to live, but also a discursive site for the construction of femininity in both ideological and literary discourses. The term gui embraces a nexus of meanings: the material frame of the women's chambers; a defining social boundary of women's roles and place; and a conventional topos evoking feminine beauty and pathos in literary imagination. Working with the literary context of boudoir poetics, yet also considering other indispensable levels of meanings epitomized in the cultural signifier guige, my dissertation demonstrates how Ming-Qing women poets re-conceive the boudoir as a distinctive textual territory encoded with their subjective perspectives and experiences. Compared with the poetic convention, the boudoir as inscribed in Ming-Qing women's texts is far more complex as its depiction is informed by nuances in their historical, social and individual experiences.