Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World explores the idea of literary history across the long span of the Chinese tradition. Although much scholarship on Chinese literature may be characterized as doing the work of literary history, there has been little theoretical engagement with received literary historical categories and assumptions, with how literary historical judgments are formed, and with what it means to do literary history in the first place. The present collection of essays addresses these questions from perspectives emerging both from within the tradition and from without, examining the anthological histories that shape the concept of a particular genre, the interpretive positions that impel our aesthetic judgments, the conceptual categories that determine how literary history is framed, and the history of literary historiography itself. As such, the essays collectively consider what it means to think through the framework of literary history, what literary history affords or omits, and what needs to be theorized in terms of literary history’s constraints and possibilities.

Li He (790-816) holds a place in China's poetic history somewhat outside the mainstream, but in every generation of readers there have been those who have found his intense and often cryptic lyrical visions irresistibly fascinating and utterly without parallel. He is renowned particularly for his lyrical reimaginings of song traditions from the ancient past, and his premature death, along with the otherworldly quality of many of his works, led later readers to view him as the emblematic cursed poet, whose fascination with ancient history, with ghosts, and with celestial and demonic beings seemed to presage the brevity of his own existence. Li He's style and diction are often idiosyncratic and even hermetic, and his work presents daunting challenges to readers wishing to follow the flights of his imagination, or simply to construe the basic sense of his language. This volume presents close translations of all of Li He's poetry, in facing-page format with the original texts, with explanatory notes on literary and historical references and difficult points of interpretation, along with endnotes briefly discussing textual variants and other technical matters. Taken together, these features will be a welcome aid to readers wishing to explore Li He's poetic worlds first-hand.

Compiled during the Song dynasty (960--1279) at the behest of Emperor Taizong, the Taiping Guangji anthologized thousands of pages of unofficial histories, accounts, and minor stories from the Tang dynasty (618--907). The twenty-two tales translated in this volume, many appearing for the first time in English, reveal the dynamism and diversity of society in Tang China. A lengthy Introduction as well as introductions to each selection further illuminate the social and historical contexts within which these narratives unfold. This collection offers a wealth of information for anyone interested in medieval Chinese history, religion, or everyday life.

Compiled during the Song dynasty (960--1279) at the behest of Emperor Taizong, the Taiping Guangji anthologized thousands of pages of unofficial histories, accounts, and minor stories from the Tang dynasty (618--907). The twenty-two tales translated in this volume, many appearing for the first time in English, reveal the dynamism and diversity of society in Tang China. A lengthy Introduction as well as introductions to each selection further illuminate the social and historical contexts within which these narratives unfold. This collection offers a wealth of information for anyone interested in medieval Chinese history, religion, or everyday life.

Shifting Stories" explores the tale literature of eighth- and ninth-century China to show how the written tales we have today grew out of a fluid culture of hearsay that circulated within elite society. Sarah M. Allen focuses on two main types of tales, those based in gossip about recognizable public figures and those developed out of lore concerning the occult. She demonstrates how writers borrowed and adapted stories and plots already in circulation and how they transformed them in some instances into unique and artfully wrought tales. For most readers of that era, tales remained open texts, subject to revision by many hands over the course of transmission, unconstrained by considerations of textual integrity or authorship. Only in the mid- to late-ninth century did some readers and editors come to see the particular wording and authorship of a tale as important, a shift that ultimately led to the formation of the Tang tale canon as it is envisioned today."