Download or read book Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio written by Pu Songling and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Act as miniatures that aim to be regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese fiction. These tales with their prose and wordplay, include 104 stories that reveal a world, in which nothing is as it seems. Here a Taoist monk conjures up a pear tree, a scholar recounts his incarnations, and a woman out-foxes the fox-spirit that possesses her.
Download or read book Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio written by Pu Songling and published by ePenguin. This book was released on 2006-05-25 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese fiction. With their elegant prose, witty wordplay and subtle charm, the 104 stories in this selection reveal a world in which nothing is as it seems. Here a Taoist monk conjures up a magical pear tree, a scholar recounts his previous incarnations, a woman out-foxes the fox-spirit that possesses her, a child bride gives birth to a thimble-sized baby, a ghostly city appears out of nowhere and a heartless daughter-in-law is turned into a pig. In his tales of humans coupling with shape-shifting spirits, bizarre phenomena, haunted buildings and enchanted objects, Pu Songling pushes back the boundaries of human experience and enlightens as he entertains.
Download or read book The Cult of the Fox written by Xiaofei Kang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than five centuries the shamanistic fox cult has attracted large portions of the Chinese population and appealed to a wide range of social classes. Deemed illicit by imperial rulers and clerics and officially banned by republican and communist leaders, the fox cult has managed to survive and flourish in individual homes and community shrines throughout northern China. In this new work, the first to examine the fox cult as a vibrant popular religion, Xiaofei Kang explores the manifold meanings of the fox spirit in Chinese society. Kang describes various cult practices, activities of worship, and the exorcising of fox spirits to reveal how the Chinese people constructed their cultural and social values outside the gaze of offical power and morality.
Download or read book The Sinister Way written by Richard von Glahn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-04-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity's diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon of noble qualities but rather as an embodiment of humanity's basest vices, greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn's study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.
Download or read book Wailing Ghosts written by Pu Songling and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '...revealing great shining fangs more than three inches long.' Some of the most macabre and wonderful of all Chinese stories, including 'The Golden Goblet', 'Scorched Moth the Daoist' and 'The Black Beast' Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Pu Songling (1640-1715). Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is available in Penguin Classics.
Download or read book One Into Many written by Tak-hung Leo Chan and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first anthology of its kind in English that deals in depth with the translation of Chinese texts, literary and philosophical, into a host of Western and Asian languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, Slovak and Korean. After an introduction by the editor, in which multiple translations are compared to the many lives lived by the original in its new incarnations, 13 articles are presented in 3 sections.
Download or read book Crossing the Gate written by Man Xu and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. In Crossing the Gate, Man Xu examines the lives of women in the Chinese province of Fujian during the Song dynasty. Tracking womens life experience across class lines, outside as well as inside the domestic realm, Xu challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. She contextualizes women in a much broader physical space and social network, investigating the gaps between ideals and reality and examining womens own agency in gender construction. She argues that womens autonomy and mobility, conventionally attributed to Ming-Qing women of late imperial China, can be traced to the Song era. This thorough study of Song womens life experience connects women to the great political, economic, and social transitions of the time, and sheds light on the so-called Song-Yuan-Ming transition from the perspective of gender studies. By putting women at the center of analysis and by focusing on the local and the quotidian, Crossing the Gate offers a new and nuanced picture of the Song Confucian revival.
Download or read book Strange Tales from Ancient China written by Pu Sung-Ling and published by Heian International. This book was released on 1987 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short stories which embrace tales of Taoist devilry and magic, the supernatural world and scenes of Chinese life.
Download or read book Historian of the Strange written by Judith T. Zeitlin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in English on the seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece Liaozhai's Records of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi) by Pu Songling, a collection of nearly five hundred fantastic tales and anecdotes written in Classical Chinese.
Download or read book Classical Chinese Literature From antiquity to the Tang dynasty written by John Minford and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 1252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains English translations of Chinese writings drawn from throughout a period of four hundred years, including poems, drama, fiction, songs, biographies, and early works of philosophy and history; arranged chronologically and by genre, with introductory quotes and comments.
Download or read book Chinese Ghost Stories Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio written by Songling Pu and published by . This book was released on 2020-11-20 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese Ghost Stories - Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, is a collection of 164 Classical Chinese stories compiled by Pu Songling. These hair-raising tales focus on the everyday life of commoners and their interaction ghosts, fox spirits, immortals, demons and other spirits. Pu Songling used the supernatural and the unexplainable to illustrate his ideas of society and government. Through the stories he criticized the corruption and injustice in society and sympathized with the poor. With the embedded Confucian-styled moral standards and Taoist principles this collection of supernatural stories. Dating back to the Qing dynasty, its earliest publication date is given as 1740. Since then, many of the critically lauded stories have been adapted for other media such as film and television. Long considered of true classic of Chinese literature, this second edition of Herbert Giles translation, with over 600 footnotes of backstory, provides a fascinating glimpse into the daily life of the Chinese in the time period, while tantalizing the reader with tales of the supernatural.
Download or read book Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque written by Jack W Shear and published by . This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Gothic Fantasy supplement for old-school fantasy role-playing games. This book contains house rules, random tables, new spells, new monsters, and a campaign setting for Gothic Fantasy adventures in the old-school fantasy RPG system of your choice.
Download or read book Zibuyu What The Master Would Not Discuss according to Yuan Mei 1716 1798 A Collection of Supernatural Stories 2 vols written by Paolo Santangelo and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 1312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the preface says that the tales in this collection of supernatural stories should not be taken seriously and just aim to dispel boredom, Zibuyu is a work with different reading levels, which allows to uncover several deep trends, taboos and fantasies of late imperial intellectual circles. Disgust, surprise and laughter are constantly evoked, by continually attracting and repulsing the reader. Yuan Mei’s approach guides the reader to an adventure in the dangerous recesses of the self. It is a sort of allegoric fantastic reflection on the relative and polyphonic essence of human beings, the multiplicity of selves from psychological perception, and a challenge to the traditional biographical and historical perspective for the unreliability of destiny. Dreams, madness, delusions and other extreme cognitive and affective conditions, abnormal events, gods and spirits, and the dark world of death lead to a reversal of perspective and destroy the Apollonian vision of the social-centered Confucian orthodoxy. With introduction, translation and comments.
Download or read book Strange Tales from Make Do Studio written by Pu Songling and published by . This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio is a famous collection of about 500 short stories by Pu Songling (1640 - 1715), a writer of the Qing Dynasty. Fifty-one stories are selected for this English edition. These stories cover a wide range of subjects, such as werefoxes and fish spirits and ghosts and monsters that are personified. Like human beings, they have feelings of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and hatred as well as happiness and discontent. These mystical stories reflect the social life of the time in which they were written. Living under a feudal monarchy, the writer had to criticize the unfairness of the feudal system and express his indignation by writing of fox spirits and monsters. Although most of these stories are progressive and written with a critical slant, some of them still have ideas of feudal superstition and fatalism. The stories in Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio are written in simple and straightforward language, but they are highly structured with complicated plots that often employ the technique of combining illusion with reality. Some of these stories are based on popular folk legends and thus have a plain, folksy style. The ideological and artistic achievements of Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio have greatly influenced later novels and operas.
Download or read book Seeds of Fire written by Geremie Barmé and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 1989, the world watched breathlessly as the pro-democracy movement swept across China, and it recoiled in horror as the Communist regime sent troops and tanks to crush the unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square. In uniting China's students, workers, and intellectuals in nonviolent protest, the pro-democracy movement became the most vivid manifestation of the long-simmering ferment beneath the official surface of Chinese society. During the past decade, a generation of strong-willed writers and artists has arisen in China, determined to gain intellectual and political freedom despite the rigidities of traditional Chinese culture and the repression of the ruling gerontocracy. Seeds of Fire provides a critical selection of the original works of these controversial writers and artists whose ideas inspired the events of 1989. It is a powerful, and moving, glimpse into the politics and the conscience of a still-volatile Chinese society.'This is the single volume that every English reader who is interested in China should read.' - Stephen Shwartz, San Francisco Chronicle'An angry and impassioned anthology which covers, better than any earlier collections, the whole range of dissident Chinese voices. Here are poets and visual artists, essayists and cartoonists, rock lyricists and novelists, all fighting for room to express themselves. All those interested in modern China should reflect on these frustrated voices.' - Jonathan Spence'Seeds of Fire fills a yawning gap; it thrusts a candle of illumination into the dark shadow of ignorance that has long cast itself over the world's most populous country.' - Richard Bernstein, The New York Times'These selections from dissident works are not mere protests but artistic fiction, honest reporting, and efforts at original thinking - writing that is rewarding reading.' - The New Yorker
Download or read book Alien Kind written by Rania Huntington and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Monster theory electronic resource written by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1996-11-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.
