Author: William Frederick Mayers

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 9781330073827

Excerpt from The Chinese Reader's Manual: A Handbook of Biographical, Historical, Mythological, and General Literary Reference The title "Chinese Reader's Manual" has been given to the following work in the belief that it will be found useful in the hands of students of Chinese literature, by elucidating in its First Part many of the personal and historical allusions, and some portion at least of the conventional phraseology, which unite to form one of the chief difficulties of the language; whilst in its remaining sections information of an equally essential nature is presented in a categorical shape. The wealth of illustration furnished to a Chinese writer by the records of his long-descended past is a feature which must be remarked at even the most elementary stage of acquaintance with the literature of the country. In every branch of composition, ingenious parallels and the introduction of borrowed phrases, considered elegant in proportion to their concise and recondite character, enjoy in Chinese style the same place of distinction that is accorded in European literature to originality of thought or novelty of diction. The Chinese are not, indeed, singular in the taste for metaphor or quotation adopted from the events or from the masterpieces of expression in the past. No European writer - it is needless to observe - can dispense with illustrations drawn from a multitude of earlier sources, and in even the most familiar language fragments of history and legend lie embedded, almost unperceived. What with ourselves, however, is at the most an exceptional feature, takes with the Chinese the character of a canon of literary art. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.