Rania Huntington – författare

To discuss the supernatural in China is “to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts.” Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter.Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded.Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As “middle creatures,” foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.

Essays on classic Chinese stories of the uncanny Since the Qing dynasty, Pu Songling's studio name, Liaozhai, has been shorthand for the Chinese story worlds of the ghostly and fantastic. These "strange" tales feature the supernatural along with oddities of the natural world; the human capacity for obsession, betrayal, and revenge; and the entanglements of family and political life. Intentionally blurring the line between fact and fiction, they critiqued the society of the author's day and continue to engage our imagination in the present. These short, gripping stories fit well in courses in Asian literatures and cultures, comparative literature, and speculative fiction. Part 1, "Materials," describes the author's life as well as the history of the manuscript, its many editions and translations, and its common themes. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," explore the contexts of the work, its adaptations and transformations, and its engagement with topics ranging from race and gender identity to otherworldly spirits and monsters.