<p> Li Deyu (787-850) is known to history as a powerful minister, a cultivated aristocrat with a taste for the rare, a military strategist of uncommon perception, a wily participant in court factionalism, and an exile. He was all of these things. He was also a poet of singular abilities. His chosen style of poetry was the <i>fu.</i></p><p> The genre <i>fu</i> is often translated with the English "rhapsody." Specialists now prefer to romanize it simply as <i>fu</i>, for it is a complex and irreducibly Chinese form of writing. <i>Fu</i> are poems written in rhymed couplets, predominately composed of tetrasyllabic and hexasyllabic lines. They can range from four lines to hundreds of lines in length. The majority of Li Deyu's extant <i>fu</i> are between fifty and seventy lines long. In the ninth century, <i>fu</i> can be lyrical, descriptive, philosophical, historical, or any combination of these. They may contain interspersed prose sections or even whole dialogues. Often they are preceded by a prose preface which describes their circumstances of composition. They are aurally rich, as is all poetry.</p><p> In short the <i>fu</i> is a style of poetry as complex and many-faceted as the man which this dissertation investigates. This is the first specialized study of Li Deyu's <i>fu</i> in any language which treats them in depth. I show that, in addition to their artistic value, Li Deyu's <i>fu</i> poetry offers a window into the world of ninth century China that affords a different view from other genres of poetry. My examination also reveals that medieval manuscript culture may be more reliably durable than hitherto supposed.</p><p> Chapter One places Li Deyu in a biographical setting which portrays his formative experiences with his father. In the process of composing a <i> fu</i>, Li Deyu then reenacts those experiences for his young son.</p><p> Chapter Two examines the blossoming of lotuses in medieval China. The lotus, ever a divine symbol of Buddhism, has an unexpected alter-ego in <i> fu</i> poetry. Its use by medieval poets, wed to both the bloom and the gathering of the plant, is most handsomely seen in the <i>fu.</i> Li Deyu's two <i>fu</i> on different lotus flowers are intimately attached to his personal life. This chapter explores the aspect of feminine sensuality connected to the lotus.</p><p> Chapter Three, conversely, scrutinizes the masculine sensuality attached to lotus flowers in medieval China. How male poets treat this topic can only be understood with reference to the feminine typology explicated in Chapter Two.</p><p> Chapter Fur recreates Li Deyu's poetic guidebook to birds. All of the species which he describes live into modern times. They have not biologically evolved in a way which we can notice in that short span of a little more than one thousand years. Yet, if one desires to see their glory as Li Deyu perceived it, one must consult his poetry. As we watch Li Deyu watching birds, we see extinct poetic avian fauna reanimated.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2004. / Thesis directed by Kevin J. Christiano for the Department of Sociology. "April 2004." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-216).

<p> My dissertation explores a cultural history of the body as reflected in meditative and therapeutic forms of the Chinese martial arts in nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. Precursors of the more familiar present-day <i> taijiquan</i> <b>[special characters omitted]</b> and <i> qigong</i> <b>[special characters omitted],</b> these forms of martial arts techniques focus on the inward cultivation of <i>qi</i> <b> [special characters omitted]</b> and other apparently ineffable energies of the body. They revolve around the harnessing of &ldquo;internal strength&rdquo; or <i>neigong</i> <b>[special characters omitted].</b> These notions of a strength derived from an invisible, intangible, yet embodied <i> qi</i> came to represent a significant counterweight to sports, exercise science, the Physical Culture movement, physiology, and other Western ideas of muscularity and the body that were being imported into China at the time. </p><p> What role would such competing discourses of the body play in shaping contemporary ideas of embodiment? How would it raise the stakes in an era already ideologically charged with the intertwined issues of nationalism and imperialism, and so-called scientific modernity and indigenous tradition? This study is an inquiry into the epistemological and ontological ramifications of the idea of <i>neigong</i> internal strength, tracing the popular spread of the idea and its impact in late Qing and Republican China vernacular discourse. I pay particular attention to how the notion of &ldquo;internal strength&rdquo; might shed light on thinking about the body in the period. Using the notion of <i>neigong</i> as a lens, this project examines the claims of the internal forms of Chinese martial arts, and the cultural work that these claims perform in the context of late Qing and Republican China. I locate the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the key formative period when the idea first found popular conceptual purchase, and explore how the notion of <i>neigong</i> internal strength became increasingly steeped in the cultural politics of the time.</p><p> Considering the Chinese internal martial arts not only as a form of bodily practice but also as a mode of cultural production, in which a particular way of regarding 'the body' came to be established in Chinese vernacular culture, may additionally yield rich theoretical fodder. How might such claims about a different kind of &ldquo;internal strength&rdquo; revisit or disrupt modernist assumptions about the body? The project highlights the neglected significance of the internal martial arts as a narrative of the Chinese body. More broadly, it suggests fresh avenues for scholarship on the body, in showing how these other-bodily "ways of knowing" took on meaning in the period and beyond.</p>

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