A Space of Their Own: The Quest for Intimacy and the Trouble of the Romantic Couple in Traditional Chinese Fiction. A Perspective from Jiao Hong ji

This paper will examine the configuration of the romantic couple in Song Yuan’s novella Jiao Hong ji from the Yuan period in the context of the earlier model set by the Tang dynasty classical tale Yingying zhuan. It will focus on the analysis of conversations and other forms of dialogical exchanges between fictional lovers in order to examine how intimacy and the characters’ search for a shared experience of mutual acknowledgment are performed within the main plot. Shifting away from the model set by Yingying zhuan, the work of Song Yuan newly addressed the issue of the place of love in Confucian sentimentality allowing the troubled emergence of a narrative of the “us”.