Cultural Memory, Ecological Writing, and Disaster Narrative:A Multi-Dimensional Study of Yellow River Poetry in the Mid-to-Late Ming Dynasty

Abstract

This article examines Yellow River poetry produced during the mid-to-late Ming Dynasty (c. 1522–1620) through a multi-dimensional theoretical framework that synthesises cultural memory theory (J. Assmann, 2011), ecocriticism (Buell, 1995, 2001), and disaster narrative studies (Moratto et al., 2022). Situating this body of verse within the most contentious phase of Ming poetic debate — the confrontation between the archaist Latter Seven Masters (后七子, Li Panlong, Wang Shizhen, et al.) and the xingling-oriented Gongan School (公安派, Yuan Hongdao and his brothers) — the study argues that the Yellow River functioned simultaneously as a site of cultural memory consolidation, ecological consciousness, and disaster testimony, and that the two rival schools mediated these dimensions in fundamentally divergent ways. Through close reading of representative poems alongside paratextual poetic criticism, the article demonstrates that the Yellow River served as a contested literary terrain in which rival understandings of the purpose and ethics of poetry were negotiated and performed. In so doing, it fills a significant gap in Ming literary historiography, which has largely examined factional rivalry through the internal logic of poetic theory while neglecting the role of specific natural landscapes and ecological crises as mediating forces.