Writing Pirates
Writing Pirates

Author: Yuanfei Wang

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2021-06-23

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0472038516

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Examines writings on China's oceanic piracy wars of the sixteenth century

Out of the Margins
Out of the Margins

Author: Liangyan Ge

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2001-09-30

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780824823702

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The novel Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan), China's earliest full-length narrative in vernacular prose, first appeared in print in the sixteenth century. The tale of one hundred and eight bandit heroes evolved from a long oral tradition; in its novelized form, it played a pivotal role in the rise of Chinese vernacular fiction, which flourished during the late Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) periods. Liangyan Ge's multidimensional study considers the evolution of Water Margin and the rise of vernacular fiction against the background of the vernacularization of premodern Chinese literature as a whole. This gradual and arduous process, as the book convincingly shows, was driven by sustained contact and interaction between written culture and popular orality. Ge examines the stylistic and linguistic features of the novel against those of other works of early Chinese vernacular literature (stories, in particular), revealing an accretion of features typical of different historical periods and a prolonged and cumulative process of textualization. In addition to providing a meticulous philological study, his work offers a new reading of the novel that interprets some of its salient characteristics in terms of the interplay between audience, storytellers, and men of letters associated with popular orality.

Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China
Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China

Author: Martin W. Huang

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1684173574

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"In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire. He further suggests that the rise of vernacular fiction during the late Ming dynasty should be studied in the context of contemporary debates on desire, along with the new and complex views that emerged from those debates.Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China shows that the obsession of authors with individual desire is an essential quality that defines traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre. Thus the maturation of the genre can best be appreciated in terms of its increasingly sophisticated exploration of the phenomenon of desire."

Appropriation and Representation
Appropriation and Representation

Author: Yang Shuhui

Publisher: U OF M CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0472038109

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Feng Menglong (1574–1646) was recognized as the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time. He is known today for compiling three famous collections of vernacular short stories, each containing forty stories, collectively known as Sanyan. Appropriation and Representation adapts concepts of ventriloquism and dialogism from Bakhtin and Holquist to explore Feng’s methods of selecting source materials. Shuhui Yang develops a model of development in which Feng’s approach to selecting and working with his source materials becomes clear. More broadly, Appropriation and Representation locates Feng Menglong’s Sanyan in the cultural milieu of the late Ming, including the archaist movement in literature, literati marginality and anxieties, the subversive use of folk works, and the meiren xiangcao tradition—appropriating a female identity to express male frustration. Against this background, a rationale emerges for Feng’s choice to elevate and promote the vernacular story while stepping back form an overt authorial role.

Reading for the Moral
Reading for the Moral

Author: Maria Franca Sibau

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1438469918

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Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space.

Sanyan Stories
Sanyan Stories

Author:

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0295805692

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Presented here are nine tales from the celebrated Ming dynasty Sanyan collection of vernacular stories compiled and edited by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time in China. 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.

Stories to Caution the World
Stories to Caution the World

Author:

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 792

ISBN-13: 0295801298

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Stories to Caution the World is the first complete translation of Jingshi tongyan, the second of Feng Menglong's three collections of stories which were pivotal in the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. These tales, whose importance in the Chinese literary canon and in world literature is without question, have been compared to Boccaccio's Decameron and the stories of A 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 in this collection provide a vivid panorama of the bustling world of imperial China before the end of the Ming dynasty. Feng Menglong collected popular stories from a variety of sources (some dating back centuries) and circulated them via the flourishing seventeenth-century publishing industry. He not only saved them from oblivion but elevated the status of vernacular literature and provided material for authors of the great late-Ming and Qing novels to draw upon. As in their translation of the first collection of Feng's trilogy, Stories Old and New, Shuhui and Yunqin Yang include all forty stories as well as Feng's interlinear and marginal comments and all of the verse woven throughout the stories. For other titles in the collection go to http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/books/ming.html