This dissertation explores how the language of regional songs fashioned the popular appeal of the city of Suzhou as the economic and cultural center of early modern China. Located in the Lower Yangzi Delta at the crossroads of domestic and global commerce, Suzhou became a hub for the circulation of tantalizing words heard and read across urban spaces, including the publishing industry, entertainment quarters, and performance venues at the turn of the seventeenth century. Suzhou-based polymathic editor Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1646) navigated this marketplace to set the trends. His most experimental publication was Mountain Songs (Shan'ge 山歌, ca. 1610s). By pushing the boundaries of writing norms, he molded local Wu speech (Wuyu 吳語, or Wu dialect)—the everyday language prevalently used by contemporaneous denizens in rural and urban communities of the greater Suzhou area—into the print medium for transmitting hundreds of racy regional songs in vogue.
Untangling the convoluted reception history of Mountain Songs, this dissertation revises received understandings of its sensational language. To Qing Confucian moralists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the book's invitation to erotic indulgence indicated local decadence and unruliness, a threat to textual authority that led to its own oblivion. By contrast, enlightenment-minded intellectuals in the early twentieth century glorified the colorful use of the local tongue in the rediscovered songbook as an index of transcendental expressivity. They read the spontaneous voices of the repressed people into the newly defined "folksongs" in line with a Romantic teleology of oral supremacy.
To rectify the dualism of textual imitation and oral authenticity, this dissertation offers a revisionist account of the fabric and affect of Mountain Songs on the local scene. Rather than taking local Wu language as a given, it places the language's constitutive role in conveying the sensorium of Suzhou at the center of analysis. Its argument is that entrepreneurial editor Feng Menglong mobilized the regional language of Wu as the cornerstone of a new fashion system in the circuits of corporeal pleasures across media, which related print to performance and amusement spaces in and out of the city. Feng did this by a creative deployment of a spectrum of linguistic registers to mediate between local cultural resources and established literary models.
Mountain Songs showcased artful verbal play that translated the bodily sensations of everyday labor and desires for consumer goods into intermedial fun and games. Feng thus reinvented the song genre by rendering intelligible the lifeworld of local men and women and their embodied experiences in a sensuously playful manner that renegotiated scholarly authority. His reinvention contributed to the allure of Suzhou as a fashionable brand that appealed to middlebrow audiences and consumers along the trade routes on land and waterways leading to the rest of the empire and beyond. As such, this dissertation brings the ephemera of Wu language back to the study of literature, advancing the localist turn historiography in dialogue with book history, media studies, urban history, and fashion history/material culture.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/dyp4-hd57 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Zhang, Yifan |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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