Transforming Gender and Imagination: Butterfly Imagery in East Asian Culture

Paying attention to the deep engagement with images of the butterfly in Chinese and Korean culture, this project traces back and explores the cultural associations and meanings of butterflies in both countries at the various levels of engagement, ranging from the elite literary discourse, to popular vernacular storytelling, and to local religious texts. This project argues that the butterfly has been appropriated in efforts to solve conflicts and ruptures, soothe anxieties and fears, and heal wounds by evoking a sense of hope and promise. At the same time, images of the butterfly have also been adopted as literary tropes that challenge and complement human morality and that have served as a test medium through which religious lessons were passed down to believers for the sustaining and bettering of their lives. The ultimate goal of this project is to instantiate in what ways and to what extent various texts, cultures, and people in East Asia embrace and interpreted the images of the butterfly and what they tell us about human imagination.