Conférence : Fate and Individual Agency in Ming Vernacular Short Story (huaben) Collections

Conférence de la Professeure Margaret B. Wan (University of Utah) à propos de son prochain livre

Le 15 octobre 2024, 10h-12h, EPHE, site Sorbonne, 17 rue de la Sorbonne Paris 5ème, salle Gaston Paris

Contact : Rainier Lanselle

My book project explores the link between print, vernacular, and concepts of the individual in the 15th-20th centuries through the lens of Chinese huaben (vernacular short stories), focusing on the popular anthology Jin gu qiguan (Marvels New and Old, 1650s?). By the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) vernacular fiction was a staple of the publishing industry and one of the most widely available forms of reading material. I combine literary history and history of the book to examine how the depiction of individual agency in huaben changes over time.

The question of individual agency versus fate became increasingly urgent in China in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), when social fluidity and rapid commercialization challenged received ideas about the relationship between education, morality, and social structure. The differences between how fate and individual agency are portrayed in five pivotal huabencollections provide a window on how huaben participated in debates on these hotly contested issues. Comparing early and middle period huaben in Hong Pian’s collection Qingping Shantang huaben (Sixty Stories, ca. 1550) with their later adaptations in Feng Menglong’s Sanyan (Three Words, i.e., Gujin xiaoshuo, Jingshi tongyan, and Xingshi hengyan, 1620-1627) not only gives us a view of the huaben in the process of being formed as a genre, but also highlights how that genre served as a marketplace of ideas about individual agency. Clusters of similar stories on demons, Buddhist monks, or folly and consequences highlight the competing moral frameworks through which these stories are presented.  As those moral frameworks are adapted, discarded, or reframed, we can see how the shifting expectations and imagined audiences for each version affected concepts of individual agency. The selection and canonization of stories in Jin gu qiguan impacted the worldviews transmitted in huaben in the Qing