BIBLIOGRAPHY

Karl S.Y. KAO (ed.), Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic, Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century. Chinese Literature in Tranlsation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), X + 406 pp.

The last few years have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of scho- larly interest in China's early fictional literature. Nowhere is this upsurge more visible than in the People's Republic of China. Many collections of Six Dynasties zhiguai xiaoshuo and Tang chuanqi have been published in new editions which usually also provide useful annotations. The beginning student can further benefit from the numerous extensively annotated anthologies of anecdotes and tales. Among these, the editor of this volume rightly singles out for praise the Taiping guan,gji xuan, 3 vols. (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1980-'82), compiled and annotated by Wang Rutao a.o. The translations, which constitute the bulk of this volume, are preceded by a lengthy introduction by Prof. Kao. It provides a lucidly written factual survey of the development of this important branch of Chinese literature during the first millennium. Its clas- sification of the subject matter of zhiguai xiaoshuo is both succinct and helpful, as is its discussion of the broadening of subject matter in the classical tale of the Tang dynasty. The suggestions for an analytical model of the narrative structure appeared to me less helpful, but that may well be because most of these tales are so simple and transparent that critical analysis would seem superfluous. Prof. Kao rightly stresses that throughout this period authors and readers shared a worldview in which the described events were believed to be realistically possible. To the extent that the transi- tion from the Six Dynasties to t he Tang marked a change, it was a shift in emphasis from the recording of the facts to the telling of the story. When discussing this emphasis on "literary processing" (p. 26) in Tang chuanqi, Prof. Kao also refers to the guwen movement. Two contemporary literary developments may well be connected in some way but the relationship between the full flourishing of chuanqi and the guwen movement would appear to be very tenuous indeed. There exists no positive evidence from Tang times that fictional writings were used in the wenjuan procedure (the pre- sentation of one's writings to potential patrons), as has been demon- strated by Victor Mair. Actually, the attention to literary form is 121 in many Tang chuanqi of the eighth and ninth centuries betrayed by a conspicuous display of parallelistic phraseology, as pointed out by the editor himself (e.g. p. 240). In view of the editor's insistence on the need of a literary (in contrast to a textual or folkloristic) approach to zhiguai xiaoshuo and chuanqi, the introduction might usefully have devoted a few pages to the relation between this type of prose and narrative poetry. On the one hand a number of zhiguai xiaoshuo tales (e.g. "Li Chi", from Sou shen ji, p. 106) explicitly state that "A ballad... is still sung to- day", strongly hinting that the tale itself is only a brief summary of a popular narrative ballad. On the other hand we know that many Tang chuanqi inspired rhymed versions or, the other way around, are prose renditions of the narrative verse of contemporary poets. An example of this latter category is Shen Yazhi's Xiangzhongyuan ci, translated on pp. 205-08. The author of this tale explicitly states that he wrote his prose version following a juefu poem by his friend Wei Ao, but all the editor has to say is that "Wei's work is not ex- tant". The relationship between chuanqi and narrative verse in Tang times (and its historical background) has been discussed at length in Glen Dubdrigde, The Tale of Li Wa (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), pp. 25-32, which apparently was published too late to be included in the bibliography. Another point which is discussed at length by Dudbridge and also would have merited some attention in this Introduction, is the problem of textual transmission. The volume under review contains a section "Biobibliographic Notes" (pp. 380-93) but the informa- tion provided there is very minimal. In a few pages the Introduction could very well have explained that due to the vagaries of transmis- sion the texts of the tales often contain important variants and that in other cases the text may have come down to us as "a condensed or truncated account of a more refined version" (p. 294). Occasion- ally the text has come down to us both in an extensive version and in a synoptic version. In still other cases the same story apparently was written down by different authors independently of one another. A case in point would be Niu Sengru's Qj Tui nu, which is not only preserved in the version translated here (pp. 248-52) but also in an alternative version. However, the existence of the alternative version is not even noted. The main body of the volume under review is constituted by the translations. Altogether ninety six anecdotes and tales are translated: sixty zhiguai xiaoshuo from the Six Dynasties period and thirty six classical tales from the Tang. The selection does not only include many well-tried anthology pieces but also a fair sample of lesser-