Re-reading the seventeenth century

This dissertation focuses on Ding Yaokang's (1599-1669) literary corpus as a lens to assess the complicated literary and intellectual landscape of the seventeenth century. Ding Yaokang is a prolific writer from a prestigious family in Shandong, and his literary output displays a variety that can only be rivaled by his much more famous contemporary Li Yu (1610-1680). Through close readings of his writings, I hope to illustrate interesting ways in which a seventeenth-century writer self-consciously explores a plethora of narrative potentials proffered by a trenchant awareness of generic conventions and the intersection of multiple discourses that condition literary creations--Confucian ethics, Buddhism, and popular beliefs. Ding Yaokang's significance lies exactly in the fact that his writings can help us come to more nuanced understandings of several important issues that contributed much to the complexity of the seventeenth century: the literati's self-fashioning as a way to reconfigure the value system and to construct the ideal authorial self; a widespread fascination among elite writers with the imaginary and the conscious maneuvering of illusion that defined the late Ming moment; as well as a discernible predilection for the playful mode of representation in fiction and drama.