Tales from Tang Dynast)' China: Selections from the Taiping Guangji.

• Author: Richter, Antie
• Position: Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian zhi - Book review

Tales from Tang Dynast)' China: Selections from the Taiping Guangji. Edited by ALEXEI KAMRAN DITTER; JESSEY CHOO; and SARAH M. ALLEN. Indianapolis: HACKETT PUBLISHING CO., 2017. Pp. xiv + 162. $46 (cloth); $16 (paper).: Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian zhi. Translated by CONG ELLEN ZHANG. Indianapolis: HACKETT PUBLISHING CO., 2018. Pp. xliv + 116. $48 (cloth); $16 (paper)

Hackett has published a considerable number of excellent books in various areas of premodern Chinese Studies. Slim, straightforward, and affordable, especially in paperback form, these books are usually of outstanding scholarly quality and thus perfectly suited for undergraduate teaching. In the last decade, translations from vernacular Chinese literature have formed a particularly interesting part of Hackett's repertoire: among them several immensely useful volumes edited and/or translated by Wilt L. Idema and collaborators and dedicated to the stories that developed around major literary figures such as Dong Yong. Mulan, and White Snake.

The two books published recently and under review here are splendid additions to this tradition. Both books present fine translations of well-chosen vernacular stories from medieval China along with introductory materials providing historical, literary, religious, and cultural context. Tales from Tang Dynasty China offers twentytwo stories from the large, imperially commissioned late tenth-century collection Taiping guangji (comprised of ca. 7,000 stories in 500 fascicles); Record of the Listener presents one hundred stories from the somewhat smaller Yijian zhi (ca. 2,000 stories in 207 surviving fascicles), a collection published serially in the second half of the twelfth century by Hong Mai (1123-1202). The texts gathered in these two collections are difficult to classify according to genre, but most of them record something out of the ordinary, from avenging ghosts to miraculous healings, strange animal behavior, journeys to hell, spirit possession, prophetic dreams, and exemplary filiality--to mention only a few of the typical topics. They are justly famous for the insight they provide into religious culture and everyday life, and deserve to be better known for their narrative finesse, which can be found both in longer, more complex tales and in brief anecdotes. Apart from these similarities, the two books under review differ in certain aspects.

Tales from Tang Dynasty China is a collective work. In...