Supervisor: Wenting Ji, Assistant Professor of Chinese Language
Student Researchers: Yuting Zeng (Class of 2026), Kun Peng (Class of 2026)
About the Project:
Zaisheng yuan 再生緣 (Destiny of Rebirth) is an 80-chapter tanci 彈詞 (plucking rhymes) fiction written in the 18th century China by Chen Duansheng 陳端生 (1751-1796). Set in the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) while reflecting the social norms in the high Qing era (1683-1799), this fiction takes a detour from a typical cross-dressing female protagonist’s adventure to seek fame and fortune in a patriarchal society, and elaborates on it with distinguished depictions of convincing characters and nuanced emotional changes. Authored by a young woman specifically for the gentry women’s community using a distinct form of rhymed language, Destiny of Rebirth demonstrates the creativity of late imperial Chinese women and provides a glimpse into their inner world and real concerns that are underrepresented in traditional literary genres. Furthermore, tanci fiction is regarded as the predecessor of today’s Suzhou pingtan 評彈 (storytelling and ballad singing in Suzhou dialect), and the story of Destiny of Rebirth also inspires popular modern-day pingtan performance titles such as Meng Lijun 孟麗君, making it significant as a cultural symbol in local Jiangnan culture.
While scholars considered Destiny of Rebirth comparable to its contemporary works such as Hongloumeng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber) in terms of the exquisite literary creativities and rich traditional Chinese cultural connotations (Guo, 1985), research on Desitny of Rebirth and tanci fictions in general remains a niche area. Only recently have scholars started to show interest in the study of tanci. Monographs such as Li Guo’s Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China (Guo, 2015), Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction (Guo, 2021), and Yu Zhang’s Interfamily Tanci Writing in Nineteenth-Century China (Zhang, 2018) paved the way for discussing this particular literary genre in the English academia. Professor Wenting Ji have authored a paper titled “Her Feet Hurt: Female Body and Pain in Chen Duansheng’s Zaisheng yuan (Destiny of Rebirth)” (Ji, 20231), which looks at the female sensitivity as represented in this particular story. However, these studies have primarily remained on the level of genre introduction and have been limited to specific perspectives such as gender studies. This situation largely stems from the lack of a complete and reliable translation, which restricts the circulation of the book and impedes its further use and discussion in today’s college classrooms.
This project approaches the tanci fiction Destiny of Rebirth from two perspectives: translation as close reading and mapping as distant reading. On one hand, we aim to translate three volumes of Destiny of Rebirth from Chinese to English, incorporating “cultural notes” that highlight various historical and cultural conventions embedded in the text. All translations will be published on our website: https://sites.duke.edu/destinyofrebirth/. On the other hand, using methodologies from the broadly defined digital humanities, we will analyze the text from the perspectives of clothing and hierarchy and visualize our findings through forms and graphs for clearer presentation. With collaborative effort of faculty and students, we seek to present the full text of Destiny of Rebirth and the literary genre of tanci fiction to a broader contemporary audience, while at the same time contribute to the academic discourse on Chinese literature, late imperial history and culture, and gender studies.
- Ji, Wenting. “Her Feet Hurt: Female Body and Pain in Chen Duansheng’s Zaisheng yuan (Destiny of Rebirth).” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, 42(1). pp. 28–65. ↩︎
