Romance Historicized: A Study on fengliu 風流 and the Ninth Century
My dissertation, tentatively titled "Romance Historicized", explores romantic narratives in eighth- and ninth-century China. During my time as a CDH fellow I will build a diachronic corpus and structured dataset tracking the usage, collocational patterns, and semantic shifts of the compound fengliu 風流 from the late Han through the late Tang dynasties — roughly eight centuries of textual production. This dataset would constitute the empirical backbone of a key argument in my dissertation: that the dramatic expansion of fengliu's semantic field during this period, from a marker of Wei-Jin aristocratic deportment to an erotic code in the 9th century, is inseparable from its transformation into a class discourse, a tool for the negotiation of distinction in a period of intense social mobility.
