Handbook of Chinese Mythology.

• Author: Smith, Jonathan
• Position: Book review

Handbook of Chinese Mythology. By Lihui Yang and Demtng An, with Jessica Anderson Turner. Handbooks of World Mythology Series. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Pp. xiv + 293, figs. $75.

While the ABC-CLIO Handbooks series is expressly designed for the general reader, a new (and widely distributed) book on Chinese mythology in English is nonetheless cause for comment--and there is much here aimed to engage a more specialized audience. Unhappily, certain features suggested in Lihui Yang's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] preface as distinguishing this volume from its forebears will have a portion of the latter readership straight into defensive stances. We find, for instance, the authors' Chineseness offered up as antidote to such ostensibly Western ills as reliance upon the Greco-Roman tradition as comparative touchstone. This characterization, capped by the assertion that past studies in English "provide readers more or less with noncomprehensive, confusing, or even misleading knowledge about Chinese mythology" (p. xi), computes as regards, e.g., Werner (Myths and Legends of China [London: Harrap, 1922]), but in reference to work more recent and relevant makes a rather harder swallow.

At least, thus incited, some will find themselves newly eager to discover whether the authors' "native mycologists' standpoint" can be turned to account. By and large, Yang and An Deming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], both folklorists with contemporary and fieldwork-driven research interests, are successful in illustrating how living mythological and folk religious traditions can inform and enrich our understanding of classical accounts. Indeed, the revival of such an approach, rooted in the folk-studies movement of early-twentieth-century China, as well as, in the West, the ethnographic analyses of Henri Maspero and Wolfram Eberhard, feels overdue. Yang and An begin, in their introduction (pp. 1-62), by considering the deficiencies of the received corpus vis-k-vis mythographic concerns, while arguing for the oral tradition as worthy methodological counterpart. If calling to mind the concern of Mark Edward Lewis ("The Mythology of Early China," in Early Chinese Religion, pt. 1, vol. 1 [Leiden: Brill, 2009]) regarding a tendency towards portrayal of early texts as consciously "duplicitous" in their treatment of mythological material, the account here seems unimpeachable on such grounds. A mild nuisance, perhaps, are the intermittent doses of P.R.C. "political...