Bloomsbury Academic Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader

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 Ming Dynasty from 1260 to 1368, these tales tackle key themes of war and peace and Confucian values of loyalty, filiality, chastity, and righteousness. Review This collection provides careful translations and in-depth readings of Ming-dynasty classical tales, a genre that has been neglected heretofore. Edited by two well-known scholars in the field of traditional fiction, it should convince readers that this neglect has been more the result of the linguistic difficulty of these tales than their intrinsic merits. --William H. Nienhauser, Jr., Halls-Bascom Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, USA 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. --Martin Huang, Professor, East Asian Studies, University of California, Irvine, USA About the Author Victor H. Mair is Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Zhenjun Zhang is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Asian Studies Program at St. Lawrence University, uSA