| Title | : | Stories to Caution the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection, Volume 2 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0295985526 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780295985527 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 771 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1624 |
Peopled with scholars, emperors, ministers, generals, and a gallery of ordinary men and women in their everyday surroundings - merchants and artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, monks and nuns, servants and maids, thieves and imposters - the stories in this collection provide a vivid panorama of the bustling world of imperial China before the end of the Ming dynasty.
Feng Menglong collected popular stories from a variety of sources (some dating back centuries) and circulated them via the flourishing seventeenth-century publishing industry. He not only saved them from oblivion but elevated the status of vernacular literature and provided material for authors of the great late-Ming and Qing novels to draw upon. As in their translation of the first collection of Feng's trilogy, Stories Old and New, Shuhui and Yunqin Yang include all forty stories as well as Feng's interlinear and marginal comments and all of the verse woven throughout the stories.
Stories to Caution the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection, Volume 2 Reviews
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Without a doubt one of the very best short story collections ever! This volume has everything I love about Chinese literature. There are supernatural tales as well as ordinary tales. Stories about ordinary people, Chinese emperors and famous neo-Confucian scholars. There is a very interesting version of White Snake which is quite different to the other versions of the stories I've read.
This volume is a complete translation of ALL the stories from the 2nd volume of the san yan. They are presented in the original order with the paired stories making really good contrasts. Nearly all translations into English of Chinese collections are very small selections so to have the whole thing is just amazing. Having the original order makes it very easy to go between the English version and the Chinese version (which is easy to find online as a free ebook) Which also makes this an excellent aid for students who are studying the language.
I can't recommend this book highly enough and can't wait for the third volume to be released in paperback. -
1624
