Embedded in varied political, social, and cultural contexts, emotions exert affecting impacts on memory, gender, and subjectivity, which in turn forcefully shape the perception of emotionality. How do emotions contribute to narrative reformulation of traumatic memories? What is the role of emotions in affording the gendering and re-gendering of literary characters? Why do emotions figure in the fissures between subjective positions alienated within performance contexts? These constitute the central concerns of this proposed session. A cluster of literary genres further frame such theoretical explorations of emotions, ranging from anomalous accounts in classical Chinese, through vernacular Chinese fiction and drama, to performance texts for storytelling in multiple East Asian traditions. Not confined to late imperial Chinese literature, this session extends the theoretical concerns of emotional embeddedness, engendering, and enactment beyond spatial, temporal, and generic boundaries to investigate how emotions shape and get shaped by the eliciting conditions.

In his presentation titled “Confronting Wartime Experience with a Sense of Humor: Joy and Horror in Hong Mai’s Yijian zhi,” Xiao Rao will explore the emotional dimensions of zhiguai (anomalous accounts) in Middle Period China by treating accounts in Hong Mai’s (1123–1202) Yijian zhi (Record of the Listener) as traumatic memories of the wars in 12^th century China. Such a reading yields new insights on Southern Song (1127-1279) society’s fear and rejoice, affective aspects of their wartime experiences that so far have rarely been addressed in existing scholarship. Rao’s research suggests that in the aftermath of the devastating wars, elites’ efforts to construct a moralized narrative of the Northern Song’s (960-1127) defeat coexisted with and might have emerged from pervasive sentiments of fear and uncertainty among the traumatized residents of the Southern Song.

In “Emotive Engendering: Anger and Masculinities in the Water Margin Story Cycle,” Zhaokun Xin breaks away from earlier dichotomous approaches to late imperial Chinese masculinities, be they concerned with the dyads of yin-yang, cultural attainment-martial valor, or analogy-differentiation. Rather, he examines the impacts of anger on varying masculine modes to complicate such dichotomous approaches by correlating the emotion with shifting masculinities. The first case in point comes from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) prince Zhu Youdun’s (1379-1439) play entitled Baozi heshang zi huansu (A Leopard Monk Returns to the Laity of His Own Accord), which originates from the Water Marginstory cycle. The play demonstrates how the emotion of anger paradoxically enables one’s alienation from and resumption of the subversive masculine model of haohan (good fellow) at the same time. A further comparison of multiple editions of the full-length novel Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin) consolidates the positive correlation between anger and the haohan masculinity. More precisely, the density of a male character’s anger parallels with the clearer specification of his assumption of the masculine mode across various editions. Rather than a paradoxical interrelation, however, the emotion in the novel consistently contributes to one’s becoming haohan, and thus features a more subversive edge in the engendering process.

With his presentation titled “Spirituality, Storytelling, and Participatory Emotional Authoring in Premodern East Asia,” Casey Schoenberger further extends the scope of this session to the wider contexts of early modern East Asia. Drawing on the proposition of historical connections between spiritual practices and East Asian poetic and performance forms like recent-style poetry, p’ansori storytelling, noh drama, and so on, by such earlier scholars as Chen Yinke (1934), Chŏng Noshik (1940), and Carmen Blacker (1975), Schoenberger has recently argued that a primary innovation of Qu Yuan’s Li sao (Sublimating Sorrow) was the adaptation of shamanistic imagery and vocabulary to the evocation of interiority, while also proposing a modification of Ling Hon Lam’s (2018) thesis about development of metatheatricality in Chinese theater with reference to a “commercial/transactional” mindset and an intermediate stage of “hierarchical” dramatic mimesis. In this presentation, Schoenberger will further explore the early development of storytelling evocation of emotion and its connections with religious teaching and spirituality in such arts as Tang Dynasty (618-907) bianwen (transformation texts), Japanese kōshiki shōmyō, and p’ansori. Though seemingly separate or even antithetical states of mind, both the commercial relationship he has associated with urbanization and the liminal space of shamanistic performance require a degree of dissociation from daily life identities. Schoenberger argues that early storytellers borrowed shamanistic techniques of drawing audiences into collective dissociative states for the purposes of tapping into, and inculcating, shared emotion concepts.