Old Tales Retold

Old Tales Retold is a collection of stories by Lu Hsun, prominent writer, thinker, revolutionary, and forerunner of China's Cultural Revolution. It contains eight stories on historical subjects, a period of thirteen years elapsing between his writing of the first tale in 1922 and the publication of the collection in 1935.

Old Tales Retold ins the third collection of stories by Lu Hsun, prominent writer, thinker, revolutionary, and forerunner of China's cultural revolution. It contains eight stories on historical subjects, a period of thirteen years elapsing between his writing of the first tale in 1922 and the publication of the collection in 1935. These eight tales are based on fables and legends of ancient China. Lu Hsun's attitude in writing historical stories as "to take a subject and write it up freely, adding some colouring of your own," which means "using ancient things to satirize the present." "Forging the Swords," for example, fully expresses the will of oppressed people to resist and take revenge; "Curbing the Flood," "Opposing Aggression" and "Leaving the Pass" etc. ridicule the absurdities of the traitorous Kuomintang regime and the reactionary "scholars" it fostered. Lu Hsun's vigorous, militant spirit is revealed throughout the collection, and his combining romanticism with realism adds much to the beauty of the tales.

Old Tales Retold ins the third collection of stories by Lu Hsun, prominent writer, thinker, revolutionary, and forerunner of China's cultural revolution. It contains eight stories on historical subjects, a period of thirteen years elapsing between his writing of the first tale in 1922 and the publication of the collection in 1935. These eight tales are based on fables and legends of ancient China. Lu Hsun's attitude in writing historical stories as "to take a subject and write it up freely, adding some colouring of your own," which means "using ancient things to satirize the present." "Forging the Swords," for example, fully expresses the will of oppressed people to resist and take revenge; "Curbing the Flood," "Opposing Aggression" and "Leaving the Pass" etc. ridicule the absurdities of the traitorous Kuomintang regime and the reactionary "scholars" it fostered. Lu Hsun's vigorous, militant spirit is revealed throughout the collection, and his combining romanticism with realism adds much to the beauty of the tales.

Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Acclaimed Irish author Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances--sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother; Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror; Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire. Acclaimed writer Emma Donoghue spins new tales out of old in a magical web of thirteen interconnected stories about power and transformation and choosing one's own path in the world. In these fairy tales, women young and old tell their own stories of love and hate, honor and revenge, passion and deception. Using the intricate patterns and oral rhythms of traditional fairy tales, Emma Donoghue wraps age-old characters in a dazzling new skin. 2000 List of Popular Paperbacks for YA

Old Stories Retold explores the ways modern Chinese narratives dramatize and embody the historical sense that links them to the past and to the Chinese literary tradition. Largely guided by Walter Benjamin’s discussions of history, G. Andrew Stuckey looks at the ways Chinese narrative engages a historical process that pieces together fragments of the past into new configurations to better serve present needs. By examining intertextual connections between separate texts, Stuckey seeks to discover traces of an “original,” whether it be thought of as the past, history, or tradition, when it has been rewritten in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Old Stories Retold shows how the articulation of the past into new historical configurations disrupts accepted understandings of the past, and as such, can be intentionally pitted against modernist historical knowledge to resist the modernist ends that this knowledge is mobilized to achieve.