Selected for Choice's list of Outstanding Academic Books for 1997.
A comprehensive overview of China's 3,000 years of literary history, from its beginnings to the present day. After an introductory section discussing the concept of literature and other features of traditional Chinese society crucial to understanding its writings, the second part is broken into five major time periods (earliest times to 100 c.e.; 100-1000; 1000-1875; 1875-1915; and 1915 to the present) corresponding to changes in book production. The development of the major literary genres is traced in each of these...

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 Chu, Chang Yi, Su Ch'in, and Ch'un-shen Chun, 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.
J. I. Crump is Professor Emeritus of Chinese literature,...

First published in 1988 in response to the growing need for documentation concerning local history in the late imperial period, Geographical Sources provides bibliographical data regarding two distinct genres: route books, and topographical and institutional gazetteers. In its second edition, this essential research tool has been completely revised and expanded with close to one hundred new entries, which provide complete coverage of these important sources for research in Chinese social, cultural, and religious history. The separate introductions to the two genres introduce the...

Yingjin Zhang guides the reader through the development of Chinese film criticism, pointing 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." 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...

The relationships, both historical and philosophical, among the Zhuangzi's Inner, Outer, and Miscellaneous chapters are the subject of ancient and enduring controversy. Liu marshals linguistic, intertextual, intratextual, and historical evidence to establish an objectively demonstrable chronology and determine the philosophical affiliations among the various chapters. This major advance in Zhuangzi scholarship furnishes indispensable data for all students of the great Daoist text. In a lengthy afterword, Liu compares his conclusions with those of A. C. Graham and addresses...