Urbanization, Generic Forms, and Early Modernity: A Correlative Comparison of Wu Cheng’en and Spenser’s Rural-Pastoral Poems

Summary

New methodological trends in comparative studies that shift the ground of comparison from the Eurocentric to a broadly diffused modernity help reveal some hitherto unnoticed channels of communication in Sino-English intercourse, especially around 1600 when England began to know about China. Despite their historical proximity, Elizabethan England and late Ming China are two distinctive cultures proceeding in widely separate orbits. The lack of direct contact, however, does not mean that the two cultures are not comparable. David Porter rightly argues that there does exist some ‘basic commensurability’ in these ‘two seemingly disparate contexts’, such as ‘the curious alignment of their political histories’ and the ‘parallels in the realms of social and economic history’. But as Porter points out, ‘questions of influence, coincidence, and causality may not be entirely pertinent’ to account for these cross-cultural analogues that seem to go beyond a Eurocentric paradigm.

This essay is an attempt to conceptualize early modern Sino-English relationship with what I would call a correlative comparative model, by which I mean a framework that privileges probable parallels rather than direct causal connections. Since correlation does not imply causation, I argue, a correlative model could at once provide a new ground of comparison for historically unrelated texts and bypass the limitations of comparisons premised upon ‘influence, coincidence, and causality’. The variables in a correlation matrix, however, could evolve into causal ones, especially given that the two cultures involved did come into substantial contact from the middle of the seventeenth century.

Choosing genre and urbanization as two correlative variables, I examine literary responses to pre-modern urbanization through a comparative analysis of the poetic dialogues in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and Wu Cheng’en's The Journey to the West [西游记] (1592). Chapter Ten of The Journey features a debate between a Fisherman and a Woodman on the rival merits of rural versus city/court life. What marks this debate inserted in an extensive vernacular story is that each interlocutor expands on the rural ideal by composing five ci lyrics, one regulated poem, and a link-verse or a long poem governed by one rhyme scheme.