Memory, Mourning, and Genre in the Works of Yu Yue

Rania Huntington explores the relationship between memory, mourning, kinship ties, and genre as revealed by the case of Yu Yue (1821-1907). In documenting the losses of his wife and daughter, and constructing a place for memory, Yu Yue used various genres-poetry, prose miscellanies (biji), letters,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Harvard journal of Asiatic studies 2007-12, Vol.67 (2), p.253-293
Main Author: Huntington, Rania
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthologies
Anthropology
Asia
Asian literature
Asian studies
Children
Couplets
Death & dying
Grief
Literature
Memory
Mothers
Mourning
Nostalgia
Poetry
Sadness
Sociological analysis
Tombs
Writers
Writing
Yu Yue
Yue, Yu
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Summary:Rania Huntington explores the relationship between memory, mourning, kinship ties, and genre as revealed by the case of Yu Yue (1821-1907). In documenting the losses of his wife and daughter, and constructing a place for memory, Yu Yue used various genres-poetry, prose miscellanies (biji), letters, and prefaces-each to different effect. Important in his attempts to document his own memories were the two women's own words; and publication of their work no less than of his proved crucial to his mourning. Noting that Yu stored his memories in books to which he assigned the names of particular places and phases of his life, Huntington uses the analogy of a "memory palace," each room of which represented a distinct area of Yu's mourning, to explore the conceptual boundaries of book and place.
ISSN:0073-0548
1944-6454
DOI:10.2307/25066855