Storytelling, Stories Concealing: A Contextual Reading of Tang Narratives

Abstract

This dissertation reads Tang dynasty narratives (7th–10th centuries) as hermeneutical tools through which the Tang people responded to the increasing unintelligibility of the past in a disrupted present. Moving beyond the dichotomy of historicity and fictionality that has long shaped scholarly discourse, I argue that Tang narratives emerged and transformed not merely as linear evolution of a literary genre or repositories of historical information, but as deliberate efforts to recontextualize the past in response to contemporary ruptures. The surge of storytelling in the eighth and ninth centuries reflects a widespread need for reinterpretation rather than invention: as the epistemological distance from the past widened, storytelling became a means to bridge that gap and render history once again comprehensible, acceptable, and “usable.”Through four case studies, I demonstrate how narrative strategies reflect interpretive efforts to resolve contextual and epistemological disjunctions. Chapter One reveals how the precedent of prisoner release lost its aura, authority, and paradigmatic power when sifted through leishu and other intermediate works. Chapter Two explores how the decontextualized overuse of yuefu titles spurred the invention of “original stories” to restore the lost authority of “history.” Chapter Three shows how lower-ranking officials in provincial administrations voiced their powerlessness and suppression by reinterpreting “silence” in earlier poetry through patterned anecdotes. Chapter Four investigates how objects emerged as narrative protagonists, revealing new emotional and epistemic enchantment with the material world in a changed social reality. By viewing Tang narratives as products of derivative, paratextual, and context-responsive processes, this dissertation recasts them as interpretive solutions— “fabrications” not in the sense of falsehoods, but as deliberate reinterpretations of the past in response to contemporary anxieties. It further argues that intermediate texts, such as leishu, did not merely preserve or transmit knowledge, but actively reshaped the interpretive frameworks of their readers and the textual landscapes. I hope this dissertation serves as a call for a new methodology in the study of Tang narratives—one that reads stories as clues to unspoken questions, and one that reminds us of the power and beauty of staying close to texts and remaining small in our perspectives.