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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.
In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to
passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service
position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of
the literati class conferred social power and moral legitimacy, but
changing social and political circumstances in the Ming (1368-1644)
and Qing (1644-1911) periods forced many to seek alternative
careers. Politically engaged but excluded from their traditional
bureaucratic roles, creative writers authored critiques of state
power in the form of fiction written in the vernacular language. In
this study, Liangyan Ge examines the novels Romance of the Three
Kingdoms, The Scholars, Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as
Story of the Stone), and a number of erotic pieces, showing that as
the literati class grappled with its own increasing
marginalization, its fiction reassessed the assumption that
intellectuals' proper role was to serve state interests and began
to imagine possibilities for a new political order. The open access
publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the
James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.
This mammoth study is a major contribution to the study of Chinese
literature, making available to scholars a genuine storyteller's
script from China's Yangzhou oral tradition, dated to the late Qing
period (1880-1910). This rare script is published in its complete
form (all 367 pages), both in facsimile and transcription, with an
English translation also made. Its publication is of high
importance not only to preserve knowledge about one of the famous
oral traditions of China, but also as a unique documentation of the
interplay between orality and literacy in Chinese storytelling. The
book is also the first translation into a European language of the
popular 'Western Han' narrative, one of a corpus of Chinese
semi-historical romances brought to life in recent decades after
the discovery in 1974 of the terracotta army commemorating the life
and achievements of the first Chinese emperor. Moreover, this
storyteller's version is unique and entertaining. The work is an
ideal classroom book for students studying Chinese history,
literature, oral literature, storytelling, etc.
The death in 210 BCE of China's first emperor, who had ended
centuries of warfare among different states across the land and
unified the country for the first time, 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. It is surprising, then, that
only recently was a full version of this narrative translated into
English--in Western Han: A Yangzhou Storyteller's Script by the
same authors. A massive work, Western Han reproduces, transcribes,
translates and annotates a professional storyteller's script dating
from the late Qing period and originating from Yangzhou, a Chinese
city known for its cultural exquisiteness. This was the first time
such a script had been reproduced in its entirety, let alone
translated into a Western language. Western Han thus has been
hailed as 'unprecedented in the scholarly literature on traditional
storytelling and fiction' and 'a true labor of love that the
scholarly community will benefit from for generations'. 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.
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