abstract: As many modern scholars have warned, the complexity of Tang narratives is far beyond the reach of Lu Xun’s twentieth-century generic labels. Therefore, we should have an acute awareness of the earlier limiting view of these categorizations, and our research should transcend the limitations of these views in regard to this extensive corpus or to being confined to rigid and meager reading of the richness of the stories. This dissertation will use a transdisciplinary methodology that incorporates both history and literature in close reading of seven Tang tales composed in the mid-to-late Tang eras (780s–early 900s), to break the boundaries between the two generic labels, chuanqi and zhiguai, and unearth significant configurations within these literary texts that become apparent only through stepping across genre. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2017