Thesis (M.A.)--Zhongguo wen hua xue yuan. / Reproduced from typescript. Bibliography: leaves 123-126.

In 1281 C.E., under the rule of Kublai Khan, the Mongols sent a fleet of more than 4000 vessels to subjugate the island nation of Japan. A powerful typhoon, called kamikaze, dashed the invading fleet into pieces on the shores of Japan and thus saved the nation from foreign rule. Historical sources suggest there were three principal vessel types involved in this event: V-shaped cargo ships for transporting provisions to the front, constructed in China’s Fukien Province; miscellaneous flat and round bottomed vessels made along the Yangtze River; and flat bottomed landing craft from Korea. In the recent past, the remains of the fleet were discovered at the Takashima underwater site in western Japan, unveiling numerous artifacts including weaponry, shipboard items, and sections of hull; however, between 1281 and the late twentieth century the site has seen major disturbances, and the artifacts are often in poor condition. Because the site contains the remains of ships built in China and Korea, the interpretation of the artifacts is also extremely complex. In order to determine the origin of the vessels, a logical framework is necessary. The author has created a timber category database, analyzed methods of joinery, and studied contemporary approaches to shipbuilding to ascertain the origins and types of vessels that composed the Mongol fleet. Although no conclusive statements can be made regarding the origins of the vessels, it appears that historical documents and archaeological evidence correspond well to each other, and that many of the remains analyzed were from smaller vessels built along the Yangtze River Valley. Large, V-shaped cargo ships and the Korean vessels probably represent a small portion of the timbers raised at the Takashima site. As the first research project of its kind in the region, this study is a starting point for understanding the real story of the Mongol invasion of Japan, as well as the history of shipbuilding in East Asia.

My thesis explores the potential and the peril of Romantic literature's increasingly complex forms through a close comparative study of the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. These writers exemplify the Romantic predicament of how to make vision manifest – how to communicate one's imaginative and intellectual expansiveness without diminishing it. They sought different strategies for increasing the capacity of literary form, ostensibly in the hope of communicating more: clarifying meaning, increasing accessibility and intensifying original experience. But textual expansion – materially, stylistically and intellectually – often threatens more opportunities for confused and partial meanings to proliferate, overwhelming the reader by dividing texts and undermining attempts at coherent thought. Expansion thus becomes excess, with all its worrying associations of superfluity. To further complicate matters, Burke's influential tenet of the Sublime makes a virtue out of excess and obscurity, raising the problematic spectre of deliberately confused/confusing texts that embody an aesthetic of incomprehension. I explore these paradoxes through four types of 'textual excess' demonstrated by the writers under discussion: firstly, the tension between poetry and prose adjuncts, such as prefaces and notes, in Wordsworth and Coleridge; secondly, De Quincey's indulgent verbosity and struggle to control the freeing shapelessness of prose; thirdly, Wordsworth's and De Quincey's parallel experiences of revision as both uncontrollably diffusive and statically concentrated; and lastly, Blake's more deliberate, systematic attempt to enact a literary Sublime in which the reader is forced out of passivity by the competing demands of verbal and visual media. All are motivated and thwarted in varying degrees by their anxious preoccupation with saying "Enough", and the difficulty of determining when this becomes “Too much”. These authorial dilemmas also incorporate larger concerns with man's (over)ambition at a time of rapid and unprecedented economic, social and intellectual acceleration from the Enlightenment to industrialism. The fear that the concept and process of 'progress', or 'improvement', marks deficiency rather than fulfilment haunts Romantic writers.