Love and Women in Early Chinese Fiction
Daniel Hsieh
About the Book
In traditional China, upper-class
literati were inevitably strongly influenced by Confucian doctrine and rarely
touched upon such topics as love and women in their writings. It was not until
the mid-Tang, a generation or two after the An Lushan rebellion, that literary
circles began to engage in overt discussion of the issues of love and women,
through the use of the newly emerging genres of zhiguai and chuanqi
fiction. The debate was carried out with an unprecedented enthusiasm, since the
topics were considered to be the key to understanding the crisis in Chinese
civilization.
This book examines the
repertoire of
chuanqi and zhiguai
written during the Six Dynasties and Tang periods and analyzes the key themes,
topics, and approaches found in these tales, which range from expressions of
male fantasy, sympathy, fear, and anxiety, to philosophical debate on the place
of the feminine in patriarchal Chinese society. Many of these stories reflect
tensions between masculine and feminine aspects of civilization as seen, for
example, in the conflict of male aspiration and female desire, as well as the
ultimate longing for reconciliation of these divisions. These stories form a
crucial chapter in the history of love in China and would provide much of the
foundation for further explorations during the late imperial period, as seen in
seminal works such as The Peony Pavilion and Dream of the Red Chamber.
Table of Contents
About the Author(s) / Editor(s) / Translator(s)
Daniel Hsieh is Associate Professor of Chinese at Purdue University.
Review
Daniel Hsieh's Love and Women in Early Chinese Fiction
provides students of Chinese literature with authoritative, absorbing
analyses which will appeal to those approaching these narratives for the
first or the fiftieth time. From his reading of nearly one-hundred zhiguai
and chuanqi tales, Hsieh isolates numerous motifs and themes — from women as
flowers to idealized mates from the other — contextualizing each within an
effective literary thick description.
William H. Nienhauser, Jr.,
Wisconsin-Madison
In this superlative monograph, Daniel Hsieh perceptively
delineates an epochal moral and cultural reorientation that occurred during
the mid-Tang period. Before the latter part of the eighth century,
intellectuals generally viewed romance with skepticism, distrust, and even
dread. Marshalling an impressive command of scores of classical tales and
dozens of other relevant sources, Hsieh deftly dissects and skillfully
documents a hitherto poorly understood transformation from the
marginalization of love and women in pre-Tang literature to an obsession
with qing (“emotion, feelings, love”) in the major fictional works of late
imperial China.
Victor H. Mair, University of
Pennsylvania
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