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Abstract At the time of the Ming-Qing transition, a large number of literati facing with political choices, and their self-identity took a dramatic turn with the change in status. In June 1646, Qian Qianyi resigned from his official position and returned to his hometown. Afterwards, his aspirations were more than ever. He gradually established his own identity and entrusted his hidden thoughts to poetry, which is preserved in the Muzhai Youxue Collection牧齋有學集. This paper delves into the text of the poem to re-examine Qian Qianyi’s perception and definition of his identity in the poems and recreate his identity construction process in his writing activities.
With the title “the fabrication of Qian Qianyi,” this paper is based on the research interest in understanding how literati faced themselves and others in the Ming-Qing transition. It takes Qian Qianyi as a starting point, and through his poems, which he echoes and contributes to others, it focuses on the definitions of Qian Qianyi’s neighboring literati, his self-definition, and the historian’s vision that Qian Qianyi reveals in his poems.
The second chapter examines Qian Qianyi’s poetry in harmony with Lin Gudu, Sheng Jitao, Gong Dingzi, Zhou Lianggong, and Gu Mengyou. The hidden mysteries, complexities, and tangled affairs of the heart in the poetic language strike at the poet, the poet who echoes with Qian, and the future reader-Qian Qianyi’s self-constructed image of himself in the face of others’ self-identification never stops. The third chapter analyzes Qian Qianyi’s poems of dedication to his homeland at the Jiawo Tang假我堂, the Wang She望社, and the Gaohui Tang高會堂, where he pours out his heartfelt feelings about Ming dynasty and places his self-interest on the image of a scholar that has been passed down for thousands of years. The fourth chapter looks at the world the poet constructed in the space of meaning of the long poem after his historical revision was not completed. The first is the understanding of the universe, and the second is that after the irrevocable failure of the real world, the poet explores and constructs a world beyond one dynasty or one surname, and imparts a new sense of history and thinking about the rise and fall of the past. In the writing, the poet’s identity as a historian, which the poet had set himself up, is revealed in the transition from “poetic history” to “history from the loyal heart”.
By examining the poetry scene of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties from the perspective of Qian Qianyi, it is possible to show that the identity of “Qian Qianyi” flowed both in the poet’s own definition and in the view of others. It is in this process of movement that “Qian Qianyi” is gradually constructed.
Keywords: Qian Qianyi, self-identity, self-definition, echoes the poetry, history from the loyal heart
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