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ART AND LITERATURE

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Exiles at Home: Stories by Ch'en Ying-chen

Lucien Miller (Translator)

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Lucien Miller's translation deftly conveys the force and spirit of Chen's prose; his colloquial American English suits Ch'en's jabs at Taiwan's Americanization.

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This was the first collection of Ch'en's stories to appear in English and its stories still challenge readers with Ch'en's keen social consciousness and commitment to the Chinese literature tradition.

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Lucien Miller is Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. ISBN 0-89264-159-2 / 210 pp. / Paper / $20.00.

Screening China

Yingjin Zhang

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In the relatively young field of Chinese film studies, few books to date offer as comprehensive a survey of its relevant historical and contemporary issues as Screening China. Author Yingjin Zhang skillfully draws connections between the films of the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, proving that not only is there a distinctively Chinese cinema-but Chinese cinemas as well.

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Zhang begins by guiding the reader through the development of Chinese film criticism. He points out that Western critics have studied a comparatively small number of films from a much larger body of work, often with a unidirectional Eurocentric bias. The result has been that the few have influenced the many, perpetuating a cycle of production of films from China that bow to the Western notion of "Chineseness."

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As a corrective, the author introduces readers to a much larger canon of film and proposes a multidirectional model of film studies, one that allows for a Western reading of Chinese film yet also recognizes Chinese cinema's own voice and its important role on the world cinematic stage. ISBN 0-89264-147-9 / 400 pp, 22 Illustrations / Cloth / $50.00.

Appropriation and Representation

Shuhui Yang

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This study explores Feng Menglong’s development and promotion of the vernacular story in Chinese literary history in his Sanyan works, first published in the 1635s. Professor Yang, adapting the perspectives of ventriloquism and dialogism from Bakhtin and Holquist, proposes a model of development into which he places Feng’s works, using this model to explain Feng’s approach to selecting and working with his source materials.

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Yang locates Feng Menglong’s Sanyan in the broader cultural milieu of the late Ming and discusses the then-dominant 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.

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Against this background he persuasively pieces together a rationale for Feng’s elevating and promoting the vernacular story while stepping back from an overt authorial role. ISBN 0-89264-125-8 / 195 pp / Cloth / $50.00.

Chan-kuo Ts’e

S.J. Fidler, J.I. Crump (Editors)

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This volume features Professor Crump’s newly revised translation and edition of Chan-kuo Ts’e and a revised version of Sharon J. Fidler’s index.

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The Chan-kuo Ts’e is China’s "largest collection of pre-Han historical anecdotes, fables, and tales of great men ." ISBN 0-89264-122-3 / 582 pp / Cloth / $75.00.

Chinese Paintings in Chinese Publications, 1956–1968

Ellen J. Laing

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This bibliography includes publications issued between 1956 and August 1968 that reproduce Chinese paintings now in Chinese public or private collections. The great majority of these publications were produced in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan.

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Each publication included in the bibliography has been provided with a detailed physical description of the publication itself. The title by which each work is referred to in the index is included at the end of each entry. ISBN 0-89264-124-X / 322 pp / Cloth / $50.00.

In the Voice of Others

Joseph R. Allen

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In the Voice of Others resurrects for the modern reader a significant body of ancient Chinese literature. Applying new critical methods to medieval works in the genre known as Music Bureau poetry (yuefu shi), Joseph R. Allen strips away layers of ossified conventional readings to expose the genre’s vital core.

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Arguing that Music Bureau poetry is best understood in terms of the imitative poetics now known as intratextuality, Allen explores the evolution of yuefu poetry and issues central to all genre formation. In the Voice of Others culminates in an in-depth consideration of the acknowledged master of Music Bureau poetry, the Tang poet Li Bo. ISBN 0-89264-096-0 / 304 pp / Cloth / $45.00. ISBN 0-89264-097-9 / 304 pp / Paper / $25.00.

An Index to Reproductions of Paintings by

Twentieth-Century Chinese Artists

Ellen J. Laing

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First published in 1984, this index of Chinese paintings covers the period from 1912 to the early 1980s, and includes entries for approximately 3,500 traditional-style artists along with lists of their works, reproduced in some 264 monographs, books, journals, and catalogs published from the 1920s to the 1980s. ISBN 0-89264-126-6 / 550 pp / Cloth / $75.00.

Legends of the Warring States

J.I. Crump

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This volume of selections and commentary by the premier Western translator and interpreter of the Chan-kuo Ts’e contains all of the author’s favorite pieces. It also features more complete Warring States narratives, the "romances"—persuasions of four of the best-known figures, Fan Chü, Chang Yi, Su Ch’in, and Ch’un-shen Chün, augmented by biographical material from the Shi-chi. This reader highlights both the nature of Chan-kuo Ts’e, an important pre-Han collection, and its considerable pleasures.

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The selections, arranged in sections on the romances, women, assassins, and parables, fables, and anecdotes, are introduced by a lively discussion of the origins of Chan-kuo Ts’e, the rhetorical devices used in its famous persuasions, the work’s relation to what we know of the era’s history, and its important characters. Includes illustrations and a section of supplemental notes. ISBN 0-89264-129-0 / 200 pp / Paper / $20.00.

The Matrix of Lyric Transformation

Zong-qi Cai

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Pentasyllabic poetry has been a focus of critical study since the appearance of the earliest works of Chinese literary criticism in the Six Dynasties period. The Matrix of Lyric Transformation enriches this tradition, using modern analytical methods to explore issues of self-expression and to trace the early formal, thematic, and generic developments of this poetic form.

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Beginning with a discussion of the yüeh-fu and ku-shih genres of the Han period, Cai argues that changing practices of poetic composition effected a shift from a dramatic mode typical of folk compositions to a narrative mode and finally to lyric and symbolic modes developed in literati circles. ISBN 0-89264-111-8 / 272 pp / Cloth / $50.00.

Painting and Calligraphy in the Wu-tsa-tsu
Sewall J. Oertling
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The late-Ming official Hsieh Chao-che traveled widely, spending most of his career in the provinces. His Wu-tsa-tsu (Five Miscellanies) is a priceless resource on Chinese thought and aesthetics in a period of profound political and social change.

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Oertling’s complete translation of the sections on painting and calligraphy is exhaustively annotated and accompanied by a lengthy interpretive essay. Oertling examines the major critical trends of the age: the orthodox, with its emphasis on direct study of classic works, and the heterodox, which encouraged personal expression and change. ISBN 0-89264-098-7 / 226 pp / Cloth / $50.00.

Pearl from the Dragon’s Mouth
Cecile C.C. Sun
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The interplay between the external world and the poet’s inner world lies at the heart of Chinese poetry, and understanding the interaction of the two is crucial to understanding this work from within its own tradition

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Closely coordinating her discussions of poetry and criticism so that practice and theory become mutually enriching and illuminating, Sun offers sensitive and original readings of poems and a wealth of insights into Chinese poetics. ISBN 0-89264-110-X / 255 pp / Cloth / $50.00.

Proclaiming Harmony
William O. Hennessey

A translation of the Chinese vernacular romance Xuanhe yishi (Hsüan-ho i-shih), written by an anonymous author in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. The story focuses on the Northern Song emperor Huizong as the dynasty begins its ignominious decline.

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Book I describes events leading up to the fall of the dynasty, while Book II picks up the tale as barbarian troops invade the capital and the deposed emperor and his son are forced into exile in the northern wilderness. ISBN 0-89264-041-3 / 200 pp / Paper / $15.00.

A Song for One or Two
Kenneth J. DeWoskin
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This study of theories of music and art in China from the classical period to the Six Dynasties is based on analysis and interpretation of textual and archaeological evidence.

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Its wide-ranging sources include mythology, aesthetic philosophy, musical lore, and notation systems. The evolution of theories of music and art is considered in the context of cosmological and moral philosophy. ISBN 0-89264-042-1 / 216 pp / Paper / $15.00.

Songs from Xanadu

J. I. Crump
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The most complete scholarly analysis of Mongol dynasty san-ch’ü poetry available in English, with many translations. The Chinese texts of all poems are included along with notes, appendixes, bibliography, and character index. ISBN 0-89264-047-2 / 248 pp / Paper / $15.00.

Tao Qian and the Chinese Poetic Tradition
Charles Yim-tze Kwong
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While Tao Qian’s unique position in Chinese literature is uncontested, there has been much debate over the relationship between Tao’s poetry and the life he lived and over the poet’s place within the literary and intellectual traditions of his time.

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Kwong’s nuanced analysis draws upon the full range of traditional Chinese literary scholarship and intellectual history as well as recent advances in Western literary criticism, hermeneutics, and comparative literature. Selected for CHOICE’s list of Outstanding Academic Books for 1995! ISBN 0-89264-108-8 / 296 pp / Cloth / $50.00. ISBN 0-89264-109-6 / Paper / $25.00.

Two Studies in Chinese Literature
Li Chi, Dale Johnson
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With an introduction, commentary, notes, and bibliography by Chang Chun-shu. Li Chi examines the career and writings of the first (and perhaps the only) professional traveler and explorer of pre-modern China.

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In One Aspect of Form in the Arias of Yuan Opera, Dale Johnson analyzes vestigial details of the lyrics in order to gain a clearer view of the musical structure of Yuan opera. ISBN 0-89264-003-0 / 104 pp / Paper / $15.00.

Voices from Afar

Irene Eber
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This study examines the influence of translated works of literature by oppressed peoples in the West upon major literary and intellectual currents in China. ISBN 0-89264-038-3 / 196 pp / Paper / $15.00.

A Glossary of Words and Phrases in the Oral Performing and

Dramatic Literatures of the Jin, Yuan and Ming
Dale R. Johnson
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This work covers the oral performing and dramatic literatures of China written over the four hundred year period from A.D. 1200 to 1635. It contains approximately 8,000 entries based on the reading notes and glosses found in various dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and editions of works from that period. As late as 1981, no comprehensive dictionary or glossary for this literature existed in any language, Asian or Western.

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With this aid even a relative novice having a reasonable command of Chinese can read, translate, and appreciate this great body of literature with an ease undreamed of even two decades ago. ISBN 0-89264-138-X / 300 pp / Cloth / $60.00.

The World Around the Chinese Artist
Richard Edwards
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In this series of lectures on the painters Hsia Kuei, Shen Chou, and Shih-t’ao, Richard Edwards explores the special relationship between the self and landscape in Chinese art.

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These three painters, each important in his own time and deemed a master by later critics, were all concerned with the subjective in the objective world. In Chinese painting there is no clear desire to separate these two realms; rather, there is a constant, conscious play between the physical reality of the world and the subjective vision of the artist.

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The artist is continually imitating the world—sometimes more, sometimes less—but he never denies its appearance to the point of total abstraction; nor in the other extreme, does he claim for the physical world an existence independent of his own involvement. 3 maps, 120 illustrations. ISBN 0-89264-143-6 / 157pp / Paper / $35.00.

The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
Tung Yueh
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China’s most outrageous character—the magical Monkey who battles a hundred monsters in the Buddhist novel Journey to the West—returns to the fray in this seventeenth-century sequel. This time, he’s defending his claim to enlightenment against a villain who induces hallucinations that take him into the past, to heaven and hell, and even through a sex change.

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The villain turns out to be his own desires, aroused by his penetration of a female adversary’s body in chapter 61 of Journey to the West from which The Tower of Myriad Mirrors takes off. In this, his only novel, author Tung Yueh (1635–1686), a monk and Confucian scholar, picks up the slapstick of the original tale and overlays it with Buddhist theory and bitter satire of the Ming government’s capitulation to the Manchu. After a nod to Journey’s storyteller format, Tung carries Monkey’s quest into an evocation of shifting psychological states rarely found in pre-modern fiction.

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An important link in the development of the Chinese novel and window into late Ming intellectual history, The Tower of Myriad Mirrors further rewards by being a wonderful read. ISBN 089264-142-8 / 160 pp / Paper / $20.00.

The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave
Xiao Chi
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In this exploration of what has been called China's greatest novel, The Story of the Stone, Xiao Chi highlights the roles of the garden, both fictional and real, to dramatize the cultural crisis of the literati in the late imperial period.
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With his extensive knowledge of traditional Chinese fiction and a remarkably crafted history of the garden as an enduring feature of elite Chinese life, the author breaks new ground in understanding this important work. For Xiao, The Stone is a lament for the end of literati culture and an allegory for the transition of literati writing from the lyric to the prose tradition. It figures the decline of poetry and the "lyrical" lives of China's elite and the rise of both the novel and new social and cultural forms fueled by mercantilism.

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By focusing on the role of the garden in The Stone, the author reveals the special linkages between the world of fiction, the world that produced the novel, and the narrative universe of the story itself. ISBN 0-89264-148-7 / 300 pp / Cloth / $50.00.