Reading resonance in Tang tales: allegories and beyond

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.