The focus of Chinese literary studies has long been on the written word even though Chinese fiction and drama have strong oral roots and have been shaped by an interplay between oral and written traditions. The culmination of decades working on this issue - and using as its lens the story about how the legendary hero Wu Song killed a tiger with his bare hands - this volume explores Chinese oral professional storytelling and its relations with literary culture in the past and present.

The focus of Chinese literary studies has long been on the written word even though Chinese fiction and drama have strong oral roots and have been shaped by an interplay between oral and written traditions. The culmination of decades working on this issue - and using as its lens the story about how the legendary hero Wu Song killed a tiger with his bare hands - this volume explores Chinese oral professional storytelling and its relations with literary culture in the past and present.

Offering access to and bringing alive unique materials on the Chinese storytelling traditions, this volume has its origins in a project which recorded on film 360 hours of performances by the four masters of Yangzhou storytelling Dai Buzhang, Fei Zhengliang, Gao Zaihua and Ren Jitang. Sets of these films have been deposited (in Washington D.C., Taipei, Beijing and Copenhagen) to give future scholars access to the unique material. The purpose of Four Masters is twofold: first, as a guide to the collections; second, with its introductory chapters, teller autobiographies, performances, catalogue entries and film material, it stands as an independent and valuable contribution to research in Asian oral traditions. With all text appearing in both English and Chinese and with its subject matter brought alive by a wealth of photographs plus a 60-minute film on VCD, this volume promises to be a classic work in its field. Useful for students of Chinese culture by serving as a bilingual guide to the great masterworks of the Chinese novel (Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Journey to the West).

The death of China's first emperor in 210 BCE initiated a brutal power struggle between Xiang Yu, Hegemon-King of Western Chu, and Liu Bang, later founder of the Han dynasty; the lowly Han Xin also strove for advancement. For over 2,000 years, the resulting story has been celebrated in China. Even today its main protagonists are household names. This is an epic tale of courage and cowardice, honour and treachery, acted out by lords, officials and soldiers, mothers, wives and concubines, and has inspired great works of literature, performance and the arts. Yet only recently has this narrative been translated into English - in Western Han: A Yangzhou Storyteller's Script by the same authors (see p. 50). To a large extent, Han Xin's Challenge is a shortened version of Western Han, largely comprising its English translation plus explanatory text. It is more than that, however. The story has been made more accessible to the general reader without compromising the accuracy of the translation. Its text is also illuminated with artwork that brings the narrative to life and shows how embedded the tale is in Chinese culture, even today. The result is a text ideal for the teaching of Chinese history, culture and literature. But also it is a sweeping drama, a page-turner, a story that anyone can enjoy.