The Problems of Genre Attribution of Medieval Female Chinese Poetry and Its Stylistic Features: Based on Liu Caichun’s Poetry

Abstract

The article presents the first Ukrainian translation of the poetic cycle "Melody from Luohong Tower", or "Waiting for [a Husband's] Return Song" ("羅嗊曲"), written by Liu Caichun (劉採春, 9 th century), one of the "Four Greatest Female Shi Poets of the Tang Dynasty" ("唐代四大女詩人").The first part of the article presents the translation of the only existing biographical fragment about Liu Caichun written by famous Tang writer Fan Shu (範攄, 9 th cent.) in "Discussions with friends at Yunxi" ("雲溪友議") and traces the patterns of interpretations of her life in the works of Chinese and Taiwanese researchers.The second part of the article is devoted to an attempt to determine the genre attribution to her poetic cycle of seven poems. It has been proven that this cycle was written in shi genre and it presents a successful combination of "ancient style poetry" gutishi (古體詩) with "modern style poetry" jintishi (近體詩): six of the seven poems are written according to the rules of jintishi wri-ting and one is of gutishi.The third part of the article reveals the use of various stylistic devices in Liu Caichun's poetic cycle, in particular, a masterful usage of phonetic (shuangshen and dieyun), lexical (various types of antithesis and gradation) and syntactic means of expression (reduplication, anadiplosis, rhetorical question) allowing to convey various feelings of her lyrical heroine and to give multiple dimensions to the author's voice.