Best of
Chinese-Literature

2014

Sanyan Stories: Favorites from a Ming Dynasty Collection


Feng Menglong - 2014
    The stories he collected were pivotal to the development of Chinese vernacular fiction, and their importance in the Chinese literary canon and world literature has been compared to that of Boccaccio's Decameron and the stories of One Thousand and One Nights.Peopled with scholars, emperors, ministers, generals, and a gallery of ordinary men and women in their everyday surroundings--merchants and artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, monks and nuns, servants and maids, thieves and imposters--the stories provide a vivid panorama of the bustling world of imperial China before the end of the Ming dynasty.The three volumes constituting the Sanyan set--Stories Old and New, Stories to Caution the World, and Stories to Awaken the World, each containing forty tales--have been translated in their entirety by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. The stories in this volume were selected for their popularity with American readers and their usefulness as texts in classes on Chinese and comparative literature. These unabridged translations include all the poetry that is scattered throughout the original stories, as well as Feng Menglong's interlinear and marginal comments, which point out what seventeenth-century readers of the stories were being asked to appreciate.

白蛇传


陈贤纯 - 2014
    The rich and fun content and easy-to-understand language makes it easy for everyone, whether they are foreigners learning Chinese, children with parents of Chinese origin, ethnic minority students of the Chinese language, or even primary school students in China, to read this series. It enables the readers to gradually improve their Chinese reading skills and enhance their understanding of Chinese culture by reading and enjoying stories.The “Folktales” subseries includes 10 stories, hence 10 books, adapted from folk legends, each book written in 20,000-30,000 Chinese characters. The titles of the 10 books are Hua Mulan, Lady White Snake, The Cow Herder and the Weaver Girl, A Golden Millet Dream, Chang’e Flying to the Moon, The Old Man under the Moon, The Butterfly Lovers, Nie Xiaoqian, Chen Shimei, and Beauty from the Painting.In the book Lady White Snake, a man called Xu Xian saved a white snake in one of his former lives. Two thousand years had passed and the white snake cultivated itself into the form of a young lady and called herself Bai Suzhen.

Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination


Tamara T. Chin - 2014
    Tamara T. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets. To promote a radically quantitative approach to the market, some thinkers developed innovative forms of fiction and genre. In opposition, traditionalists reasserted the authority of classical texts and advocated a return to the historical, ethics-centered, marriage-based, agricultural economy that these texts described. The discussion of frontiers and markets thus became part of a larger debate over the relationship between the world and the written word. These Han debates helped to shape the ways in which we now define and appreciate early Chinese literature and produced the foundational texts of Chinese economic thought. Each chapter in the book examines a key genre or symbolic practice (philosophy, fu-rhapsody, historiography, money, kinship) through which different groups sought to reshape the political economy. By juxtaposing well-known texts with recently excavated literary and visual materials, Chin elaborates a new literary and cultural approach to Chinese economic thought.

Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels


Jeffrey C Kinkley - 2014
    Writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Ge Fei, Li Rui, and Zhang Wei skew and scramble common conceptions of China's modern development, deploying avant-garde narrative techniques from Latin American and Euro-American modernism to project a surprisingly "un-Chinese" dystopian vision and critical view of human culture and ethics.The epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction make rich use of magical realism, surrealism, and unusual treatments of historical time. Also featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence, as well as dark, raunchy comedy, these novels reflect China's recent history re-presenting the overthrow of the monarchy in the early twentieth century and the resulting chaos of revolution and war; the recurring miseries perpetrated by class warfare during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong; and the social dislocations caused by China's industrialization and rise as a global power. This book casts China's highbrow historical novels from the late 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century as a distinctively Chinese contribution to the form of the global dystopian novel and, consequently, to global thinking about the interrelations of utopia and dystopia.

From the Old Country: Stories and Sketches of China and Taiwan


Lihe Zhong - 2014
    His fictional portraits unfold on Japanese battlefields and in Peking slums, as well as in the remote, impoverished hill-country villages and farms of his native Hakka districts. His scenic descriptions are deft and atmospheric, and his psychological explorations are acute. The first anthology to present his work in English, this volume features two novellas, ten short stories, and four short prose works.

Mu Shiying: China's Lost Modernist: New Translations and an Appreciation


Andrew David Field - 2014
    As Andrew David Field argues, Mu Shiying advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May 4 giants Lu Xun and Lao She to even more starkly reveal the alienation of the cosmopolitan-capitalist city of Shanghai, trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism. Each of these five short stories focuses on the author's key obsessions: the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships of the modern city and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure in Shanghai epitomized by the dance hall and the nightclub. This study places his writings squarely within the framework of Shanghai's social and cultural nightscapes.

Poems to Kids 给孩子的诗


Bei Dao 北岛 - 2014
    With the kindling of thoughts, literature and civilization, we bring them to kids to light up the reading space of next generation.本书重绘了新诗版图,确立了经典标准,携带着思想、文学、文明的火种,交给孩子,照亮下一代的阅读空间。

嫦娥奔月


Chen Xianchun 陈贤纯 - 2014
    Hou Yi went to Tianshan where he learned tremendous ability from the Queen Mother of the West and killed ten evil beasts. Then he went back home and married Chang’e. However, the villain Feng Meng who had always coveted Chang’e murdered Hou Yi. Chang’e, after eating a magical pill from the Queen Mother of the West, flied to the moon and became an immortal after avenging Hou Yi.

The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination


Haiyan Lee - 2014
    Family and communal bonds have been broken in a country once known as "a society of kith and kin." There has been a pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China, and the new market economy doesn't seem to offer any solutions.This book investigates how the Chinese have coped with the condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrust together. Haiyan Lee dismisses the easy answers claiming that this "moral crisis" is merely smoke and mirrors conjured up by paternalistic, overwrought leaders and scholars, or that it can be simply chalked up to the topsy-turvy of a market economy on steroids. Rather, Lee argues that the perception of crisis is itself symptomatic of a deeper problem that has roots in both the Confucian tradition of kinship and the modern state management of stranger sociality.This ambitious work is the first to investigate the figure of the stranger—foreigner, peasant migrant, bourgeois intellectual, class enemy, unattached woman, animal—across literature, film, television, and museum culture. Lee's aim is to show that hope lies with a robust civil society in which literature and the arts play a key role in sharpening the moral faculties and apprenticing readers in the art of living with strangers. In so doing, she makes a historical, comparative, and theoretically informed contribution to the on-going conversation on China's "(un)civil society."