Literary criticism

New Book Announcement: “A Companion to The Story of the Stone” by Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien-yung

A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide, Susan Chan Egan, Pai Hsien-yung (Columbia University Press, April 2021)
A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide, Susan Chan Egan, Pai Hsien-yung (Columbia University Press, April 2021)

The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature, beloved by readers ever since it was first published in 1791. The story revolves around the young scion of a mighty clan who, instead of studying for the civil service examinations, frolics with his maidservants and girl cousins. The narrative is cast within a mythic framework in which the protagonist’s rebellion against Confucian strictures is guided by a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system.

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“Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry” by David Hinton & “The Selected Poems of Tu Fu”, translated by David Hinton

Serendipity, we may say, is a wonderful thing sometimes. Here are both a newly expanded edition of Hinton’s translation of Tu Fu’s poems, and at the same time his book about Tu Fu’s life as exemplified in an examination of some of these poems as they relate to the poet’s precipitous journey through life.

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New Book Announcement: “The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon” by William C Hedberg

The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon, William C Hedberg (Columbia University Press, October 2019)
The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon, William C Hedberg (Columbia University Press, October 2019)

The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in 12th-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early 17th century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China than The Water Margin.

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New Book Announcement: “Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou” by David Chaffetz

Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou, David Chaffetz (Abbreviated Press, November 2019)
Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou, David Chaffetz (Abbreviated Press, November 2019)

The diva is a nearly universal phenomenon. Wherever poetry, music and mime have been practised with virtuosity, great women performers always take centre stage. Traditional Asian divas are however less well known and understood among English language readers than the great divas of Mozart and Puccini. Whether from Shiraz at the court of the Injuids, from Delhi during the twilight of the Moghuls, or from Yangzhou under the last Ming emperors, these Asian divas constitute the first identifiably modern women.

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“Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem” by Michael Schmidt

The Epic of Gilgamesh, as it’s usually titled by scholars and translators, may in fact not be an epic at all. It’s not even a single poem, but “a confusion of stories”, a number of reassembled fragments and tablets in more than one ancient language plus an “edition” assembled and organised out of scattered bits by one Sin-leqi-unninni, who between 1300 and 1000 BCE made what we would now call a “standardized text” out of it, adding, as Schmidt tells us, “prefatory lines … and a reprise that echoes the opening but in a darker tone.”

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New Book Announcement: “The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction” by John Christopher Hamm

The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction, John Christopher Hamm (Columbia University Press, August 2019)
The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction, John Christopher Hamm (Columbia University Press, August 2019)

Xiang Kairan, who wrote under the pen name “the Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang,” is remembered as the father of modern Chinese martial arts fiction, one of the most distinctive forms of twentieth-century Chinese culture and the inspiration for China’s globally popular martial arts cinema. In this book, John Christopher Hamm shows how Xiang Kairan’s work and career offer a new lens on the transformations of fiction and popular culture in early-twentieth-century China.

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“If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years” by Christopher Benfey

Two famous Englishmen, two hundred years or so apart, tried to emigrate to America and failed. One was Oliver Cromwell, who in 1634 found himself in so much debt that he sold up much of his property and decided to sail off to Connecticut for a life in the New World. Unfortunately, he was denied permission to leave England, and never got on the boat, leaving historians to wonder what would have happened (or wouldn’t have) had he been issued a passport. The other was Rudyard Kipling, who fared rather better.

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New Book Annoucement: “un\\martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry” by Nhã Thuyên

un\\martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry , Nha Thuyen (Roof Books, June 2019)
un\\martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry, Nha Thuyen (Roof Books, June 2019)

un\\martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry by Nhã Thuyên, a Hanoi-based poet and critic, is a collection of essays that offers a cartography of the writing communities that have lived (and died) along the margins of Vietnam’s literary landscape since the Renovation period of the late 1980’s.

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“How to Read a Japanese Poem” by Steven D Carter

Anyone who has ever studied literature has probably come across the now rather hackneyed line by the American poet Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), “A poem should not mean, but be.” Steven Carter, the Yamato Ichihashi Emeritus Professor of Japanese History and Civilization at Stanford University, notes that the Japanese poet Shōtetsu (1381-1459) expressed similar sentiments long before MacLeish. “A truly excellent poem is beyond logic,” he wrote, “One cannot explain it in words; it can only be experienced of itself.”

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