Lamenting Yue Fei (1103-1142) in Travel Literature in the Yuan Dynasty: Its Commemorative Writings and Sites on Death, Loyalty, and Memory

The experience of wars in the Southern Song Dynasty and its aftermath allow us to pursue our inquiry on the cross section between the commemorative writings of martyrs, archetypes of loyalty and heroism, as well as psychoanalytic, literary, and cultural studies down the line of literary historical perspective from the Song to the Yuan Dynasties. One notable feature is that Yuan literature about the accounts of the fall of the Southern Song and archetypes of wartime heroes tends to constitute places of commemoration (including ruins, tombs, and travel spots in the human environment) that associate the Yuan cataclysm and its martyrs and archetypes of loyalty and heroism. This paper will focus on the representations of the Song hero Yue Fei (1103-1142) in Yuan times and ask the following questions on the relationships between war, trauma, commemorative sites, and travel literature: accounts about the commemoration of Yue Fei shared many themes – the horrors of death, the enhancement and destruction of commemorative sites for Yue Fei, the pain of loss and displacement, human vulnerability, and nostalgia of the past – how these lyrical voices and highly stylized language constituted the huaigu writing and created cultural travel in Yuan times. This paper will investigate why wartime poetry and prose were an important factor in pivoting new developments in the construction of the archetypes of martyrs, heroism, and commemorative sites in the Yuan Dynasty.