Verse within Prose : Annotating and Classifying Narrative Functions of Embedded Poems in Chinese Qing (1644-1912) Vernacular Fiction

What narrative functions do poems serve when interwoven with vernacular prose? This article takes what has often been labeled as "embedded poems" or "parasitic poems" in late imperial Chinese fiction as the primary subject of study. We examine the narrative roles of these poems within a selected corpus of Qing dynasty fiction, specifically investigating if an approach that combines human annotation with large language models can aptly capture and automatically classify their narrative functions. Through two rounds of iterative annotation and large language model testing, we demonstrate both the potential and limitations of this approach. As one of the few studies that applies large language models to Chinese literary research, our work lays the groundwork for future large-scale investigations into the dynamics between verse and prose in classical Chinese literature, incorporating both canonical works and beyond.