Chinese Literature in Translation – Serie

" . . . the most comprehensive book of translation of this period in any Western language." —Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association" . . . a welcome addition to the repository of translated Chinese poetry. . . . highly readable." —World Literature Today" . . . a mega-project . . . an impressive achievement of scholarship." —Journal of Asian Studies" . . . an outstanding anthology of Ch'ing poetry . . . It must be recommended whole-heartedly to students and teachers alike." —Eugen Feifel, Monumenta Serica

Praise for the first edition:". . . in the great tradition of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn; its true subject is the survival—and sometimes the defeat—of the human spirit in its lonely quest for integrity." —Time"The almost childlike directness of Chen's tales. . . is captured in the very lightly revised translations of this new edition. . . Highly recommended." —ChoiceA classic of modern world literature, this collection of stories provides a vivid and poignant eyewitness view of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution. For this edition, Howard Goldblatt has thoroughly revised the text and updated it to Pinyin romanization. In a new introduction, Perry Link reflects on the book's significance in the post-Tiananmen era. Twenty-five years after its first publication, The Execution of Mayor Yin has lost none of its power to move the reader, and remains unmatched as a document of the period.

In Chinese literary history, the Six Dynasties (317-588) and the T'ang (618-906) were the great creative times for the production of supernatural and fantastic stories in the classical language. This major collection of ninety-six stories, most of them newly translated, represents the very best of this tradition. These are all basically fictional narratives or stories, but unlike Western supernatural stories, are considered more or less as records of observable facts and have the effect of giving the fantastic a rootedness in historical reality. Underlying the recording of these supernatual stories is a belief in supernaturalism and magic and, above all, the acceptance of the unnatural and the supernormal on their face value as factual.