In the Ming and Qing periods, the Chinese read fiction in editions with extensive commentary printed on the same page as the fiction itself. This commentary was concerned less with helping the reader understand the -letter- of the text than with drawing the reader's attention to its more notable aspects through emphatic punctuation (similar to our underlining, italics, or highlighting) and evaluative comments. Authors developed four different approaches to the challenges this type of commentary presented: they wrote their own commentary, they modeled aspects of their narrators on fiction...
In the Ming and Qing periods, the Chinese read fiction in editions with extensive commentary printed on the same page as the fiction itself. This comm...
Fiction criticism has a long and influential history in pre-modern China, where critics would read and reread certain novels with a concentration and fervor far exceeding that which most Western critics give to individual works. This volume, a source book for the study of traditional Chinese fiction criticism from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, presents translations of writings taken from the commentary editions of six of the most important novels of pre-modern China. These translations consist mainly of tu-fa, or "how-to-read" essays, which demonstrate sensitivity...
Fiction criticism has a long and influential history in pre-modern China, where critics would read and reread certain novels with a concentration a...
