The Oil Vendor And The Courtesan

These eight tales from the Song and Ming Dynasties present readers with a colorful tapestry of adventure and misadventure, erotic romance, crafty intrigue, supernatural fantasy, comedies of errors, and crimes and punishment in sixteenth and seventeenth century China.

These eight tales from the Song and Ming Dynasties present readers with a colorful tapestry of adventure and misadventure, erotic romance, crafty intrigue, supernatural fantasy, comedies of errors, and crimes and punishment in sixteenth and seventeenth centruy China.

Chloe Starr's book offers a comprehensive literary reading of six nineteenth-century Chinese red-light novels and assesses how and why they alter our view of late Qing fiction and the authorial self.

Falling in love, with all its accompanying problems, was a subject of obsessive interest among writers and readers in the Ming Dynasty, when society held strictly to arranged marriages. The stories in this engaging collection all deal with this theme in very different ways, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically. They portray young people choosing their own lovers, resorting to ingenious stratagems and risky escapades in defiance of contemporary mores. Chosen to represent the best works from the great age of the vernacular story, they offer an admirable introduction to the world of Chinese fiction in this era. All of the stories in Falling in Love have been translated especially for this volume, and most appear here in translation for the first time. They are taken from two works, Constant Words to Awaken the World (Xing shi heng yan) and a related collection, The Rocks Nod Their Heads (Shi dian tou), both published in the early seventeenth century.

Klappentext: "This is a selection of popular Chinese stories from the 10th to the 17th centuries. These stories were written in the spoken language that developed as a literary medium after the emergence of an urban commercial economy in the Song Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279). Originally the manuscripts of ordinary street story-tellers, this genre of fiction - deriving its material from the life and times of the period, with vivid writing and intricate plots, descriptions that are natural and vivacious - has now attained a lofty place as literature. The twenty stories in this book are selected from over two hundred in several collections published at the beginning of the 17th century. The illustrations included in this volume are taken from contemporary editions." - Enthält: Introduction. - The jade worker. - The honest clerk. - Fifteen strings of cash. - The monk's billet-doux. - The foxes' revenge. - The hidden will. - The two brothers. - The beggar chief's daughter. - A just man avengd. - The tattered felt hat. - The courtesan's jewel box. - The oil vendor and the courtesan. - The old gardener. - Marriage by proxy. - The proud scholar. - The tangerines and the tortoise shell. - The story of a breggart. - The alchemist and his concubine. - A prefectship bought and lost. - The merry adventures of Lazy Dragon. - Die Erzählungen sind drei Sammlungen des Feng Menglong (Yushi mingyan, Jingshi tongyan und Xingshi hengyan) sowie der Sammlung "Paian jingqi" des Lin Mengchu entnommen. Insbesondere Erzählungen in den Sammlungen des Feng Menglong lassen sich vielfach auf ältere Quellen zurückführen.

While a slender body is a prerequisite for beauty today, plump women were considered ideal in Tang Dynasty China and Heian-period Japan. Starting around the Southern Song period in China, bound feet symbolized the attractiveness of women. But in Japan, shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth long were markers of loveliness. For centuries, Japanese culture was profoundly shaped by China, but in complex ways that are only now becoming apparent. In this first full comparative history of the subject, Cho Kyo explores changing standards of feminine beauty in China and Japan over the past two millennia. Drawing on a rich array of literary and artistic sources gathered over a decade of research, he considers which Chinese representations were rejected or accepted and transformed in Japan. He then traces the introduction of Western aesthetics into Japan starting in the Meiji era, leading to slowly developing but radical changes in representations of beauty. Through fiction, poetry, art, advertisements, and photographs, the author vividly demonstrates how criteria of beauty differ greatly by era and culture and how aesthetic sense changed in the course of extended cultural transformations that were influenced by both China and the West.

"Kingdoms in Peril is an epic historical novel covering the five hundred and fifty years of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, from the civil wars and invasions that marked the birth of a new regime in 771 BCE to the unification of China in 221 BCE. Kingdoms in Peril was written in the 1640s, at the very end of the Ming dynasty, by the great novelist Feng Menglong (1574-1646). In the course of the one hundred and eight chapters of the complete novel, he documents the collapse of the Zhou confederacy during the Spring and Autumn period (771-475 BCE) and the slow rebuilding of civil society during the Warring States era (475-221 BCE) which culminated in the unification of China under the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty (r. 246-221 BCE as king; r. 221-210 BCE as emperor). Thus overall this novel describes a grand arc, from stability to chaos and back again. As a novel about politics, much of the narrative in Kingdoms in Peril concentrates on the exercise of power"--

During the centuries of its popularity, early Chinese vernacular fiction was never adequately preserved or even documented. The great popular appeal of the short stories saved them from oblivion, but it was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they were first collected and published. Mr. Hanan's erudite study is the first thorough attempt to uncover the history of the Chinese short story. Using a variety of techniques, but principally that of stylistic analysis, the author solves the fundamental problem of dating the stories in terms of periods. He is able to place each story in one of three broad categories, early (ca. 1250-1450), middle (ca. 1400-1575), and late (ca. 1550-1627), and to assign some of them to the earlier or later part of the time span. In many cases he offers evidence of sources and influences, place of origin, and possible or probable authorship. On the basis of the author's research, it is possible to see in minutely researched detail how the short story developed in China, what kind of men composed it, its relationship to other kinds of literature, and the main social preoccupations with which it deals. The results of Mr. Hanan's study are vitally important to all scholars of Chinese literature. Historians and linguists will also find it valuable as a model of the innovative use of stylistic analysis.

Against the historical background of Chinese translation in the West and the emergence of several prominent European translators of China, this book examines the role of a translator in terms of cross-cultural communication, the image of the foreign culture in the minds of the target audience, and the influence of their translations on the target culture. With the focus on the career and output of the Dutch translator Henri Borel (1869–1933), this study investigates different aspects of the role of translator. The investigation is carried out by analysing texts and probing the achievements and contributions of the translator, underpinned by documents from the National Archives and the Literature Museum in the Hague, the Netherlands. Based on the findings derived from this study, advice is offered to those now involved in the promotion and translation of Chinese culture and literature. It will make an important contribution to the burgeoning history of Chinese translation. This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest or background in the translation history of China, the history of sinology in the West, and the role of translators.