Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Volumes 1 and 2)

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Volumes 1 and 2)

From the above curious document the reader will gain some insight into the abstruse, but at the same time marvellously beautiful, style of this gifted writer. The whole essayfor such it is, and among the most perfect of its kindis intended chiefly as a satire upon the scholarship of the age; scholarship which had turned the author back to the disappointment of a private life, himself conscious all the time of the inward fire that had been lent him by heaven. It is the key-note to his own subsequent career, spent in the retirement of home, in the society of books and friends; as also to the numerous uncomplimentary allusions which occur in all his stories relating to official life. Whether or not the world at large has been a gainer by this instance of the fallibility of competitive examinations has been already decided in the affirmative by the millions of Pu Sung-lings own countrymen, who for the past two hundred years have more than made up to him by a posthumous and enduring reverence for the loss of those earthly and ephemeral honours which he seems to have coveted so much. Such, then, is the setting of this collection of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, many of which contain, in addition to the advantages of style and plot, a very excellent moral. The intention of most of them is, in the actual words of Tang Mng-lai, to glorify virtue and to censure vice,always, it must be borne in mind, according to the Chinese and not to a European interpretation of these terms. As an addition to our knowledge of the folk-lore of China, and as an aperu of the manners, customs, and social life of that vast Empire, my translation of the Liao-Chai may not be wholly devoid of interest. The amusement and instruction I have myself derived from the task thus voluntarily imposed has already more than repaid me for the pains I have been at to put this work before the English public in a pleasing and available form. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 43629
Author: Pu, Songling
Release Date: Sep 3, 2013
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Giles, Herbert Allen, 1845-1935