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With commentary and annotations throughout, Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader presents for the first time in English 10 key stories from China's Ming Dynasty era. Casting new light on this significant period in Chinese literary history, these tales bring Ming era China vividly to life, from its chaotic beginnings to its imperial heyday. As well as bearing witness to social change across the 100-year life of the Yuan Dynasty from 1260 to 1368, these tales tackle key themes of war and peace and Confucian values of loyalty, filiality, chastity, and righteousness.
List of contents
Introduction Victor H. Mair and Zhenjun Zhang
1.Qu You, "The Golden Phoenix Hairpin" (Translated by Paul W. Kroll)
2.Qu You, "The Tale of Cuicui" (Translated by Zhenjun Zhang and Sidney Sondergard)
3.Qu You, "The Account of the Legal Administrator of the Grand Void" (Translated by Kelsey Seymour)
4.Qu You, "The Tale of the Lady in Green" (Translated by Yunwen Gao)
5.Li Changqi, "The Record of a Phoenix-Tail Fern" (Translated by Qian Liu and Joanne Tsao)
6.Li Changqi, "The Record of the Lotus Screen" (Translated by Weiguo Cao)
7.Li Changqi, "The Tale of the Swing-play Gathering" (Translated by Jing Wang)
8.Shao Jingzhan, "The Tale of Young Master Yao" (Translated by Chen Wu)
9.Song Maocheng , "The Faithless Lover" (Translated by Zhenjun Zhang)
10. Song Maocheng, "The Pearl Shirt" (Translated by Jing Hu)
Notes on the Editors and Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Victor H. Mair is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the co-editor of Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader (Bloomsbury, 2022).Zhenjun Zhang is Professor of Asian Studies & Modern Languages and Literatures, St. Lawrence University, USA.
Summary
With commentary and annotations throughout, Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader presents for the first time in English 10 key stories from China's Ming Dynasty era. Casting new light on this significant period in Chinese literary history, these tales bring Ming era China vividly to life, from its chaotic beginnings to its imperial heyday.
As well as bearing witness to social change across the 100-year life of the Yuan Dynasty from 1260 to 1368, these tales tackle key themes of war and peace and Confucian values of loyalty, filiality, chastity, and righteousness.
Foreword
The first annotated English translation of 10 key Ming Dynasty tales, with an introduction and commentaries on each tale.
Additional text
This is the first collection in the translation of the representative works of tales in literary Chinese from Ming China, a literary genre that has yet to receive the scholarly attention it richly deserves. The introduction provides a helpful overview of the Ming dynasty tales in terms of its history, its crucial role in the development of premodern Chinese fiction and its influence over the literature of later ages. The translation of each tale is accompanied by copious notes and a reading guide that places the tale in its large historical and literary contexts, with helpful information on further reading. Because many of these tales are the results of rewriting of previous sources and would continue to be rewritten during late times, the reading guides have done an excellent job in helping the reader better appreciate not only these tales for their own literary merits but also their intertextual complexities as well as their significances in the development of late imperial Chinese literature in general. This collection is a nice contribution to study of Chinese fiction and late imperial Chinese society.
