Fictional medicine: Diseases, doctors and the curative properties of Chinese fiction (Cao Xueqin, Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, Liu E, Xia Jingqu, Wang Zhenhe).

详细信息   

• 作者：Schonebaum ; Andrew David.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2004
• 导师：Shang, Wei
• 毕业院校：Columbia University
• 专业：Literature, Asian.;History, Asia, Australia and Oceania.;History of Science.
• ISBN：0496855263
• CBH：3138365
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：26529261
• Pages：512

文摘

Lu Xun was concerned with the backward state of his country embodied by antiquated medical systems and beliefs; he was concerned with becoming a doctor of the Chinese spirit and he was concerned with propagating a new medicine for literature itself: vernacular fiction. He was concerned with healing both his country's social ills and his country's literary tradition. This medicalized "obsession with China," in which writers of modern Chinese fiction turn a diagnostic gaze to a symbolic body that was always already sick, is often attributed to foreign incursions into the Chinese cultural terrain. While Ding Ling, Wu Zuxiang, Lao She, Jiang Guangci and Yu Dafu employ notions of disease that clearly borrow from European traditions, this project seeks to understand the premodern and domestic antecedents of those medical trends in modern Chinese literature. The first chapter examines the evolution of the doctor in premodern fiction from the charlatan, quack or clown (a tradition carried over from Yuan and Ming dynasty drama) to the noble, Confucian, scholar-doctor. It also seeks to understand the social trends that contributed to this evolution, particularly the rise of the doctor as author. The second chapter focuses on discourses of medicine and disease in the novel text. It considers the form of novel as it circulated in late imperial China, framed by paratextual materials in commentary editions that discuss medical episodes and representations and appropriate medical rhetoric for the purposes of literary criticism. It is also concerned with the rise of the medical narrative as a genre of medical literature that also had an impact on the writing of fiction, with both genres borrowing forms and knowledge from the other. The third chapter seeks to trace premodern notions of contagion, a major force in the formation of modern subjectivity, through an analysis of venereal and sexually transmitted diseases in fiction. The fourth chapter returns to a discussion of modern Chinese literature and its employment of medical discourses as they were borrowed from foreign literature or continuing domestic traditions of doctors and diseases in premodern vernacular fiction.