"Sarah M. Allen, Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014" (original) (raw)
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Old Stories No Longer Told: The End of the Anecdotes Tradition of Early China
In Chapter 10 “Old Stories No Longer Told: The End of the Anecdotes Tradition of Early China” of the book Between History and Philosophy: Anecdotes in Early China, Paul van Els demonstrates that, although anecdotes occur across historical periods and literary genres, the specific anecdotes that were omnipresent in philosophical argumentation in early China, were hardly deployed in later texts. In this closing chapter, van Els offers tentative explanations for the decline.
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Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2023
Where did the many anecdotes filling the pages of Chinese Buddhist "miracle tales" come from? What sort of literature do these narratives constitute? And what difference do the answers to these questions make? This paper adduces evidence that these narratives were compiled as reports of events alleged to have actually occurred and that they reached their eventual compilers through networks of written and oral exchange among people who shared an interest in sponsoring, promulgating, and preserving them. To see them as didactic fictions fabricated by individual authors to help inculcate Buddhist values is to fundamentally misunderstand these texts. In fact, the very notion of author proves misleading. Understanding the genre correctly as a textual concretization of social memory has important implications for grasping the ways in which these texts are important and useful for historians both of Buddhism and of narrative literature in China.
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Oriens Extremus, 2017
Anecdotes are important vehicles of memory in the construction of historical narratives as well as of various perspectives and discourses on the past.1 Accounts from major midand late Tang collections of historical anecdotes, such as Liu Su’s 劉肅 (fl. 806–820) Da Tang xinyu 大唐新語 and Li Zhao’s 李肇 (fl. ca. 812–830) Guoshi bu 國史補, have been widely quoted as source material in historical writings and “brush jottings” (biji 筆記) of later times, as well as in scholarly research today. However, as Anna M. Shields points out in her study of the Guoshi bu as mid-Tang political and social critique, the original objectives of these miscellaneous collections and how they selected and organized their material remain important and deserve due attention.2 Instead of reading large collections with hundreds of accounts such as the Guoshi bu, this paper examines a small late Tang compilation of sixteen anecdotes, titled Songchuang zalu 松牕雜錄 (Miscellaneous Notes under the Pine Window), to reveal its dis...
In this introductory chapter of the book Between History and Philosophy, Paul van Els and Sarah A. Queen discuss characteristic features of early Chinese anecdotes. They first outline a more general understanding of anecdotes, based on scholarly literature that focuses predominantly on anecdotes in German, English, and other European languages. Then, they analyze how anecdotes in the Chinese tradition correspond to, and differ from, the more general understanding of anecdotes.
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Ye Xian and her sisters: the role of a tang story in the Cinderella cycle
2018
Ye Xian is the protagonist of a story written in the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) which has been defined as “the Chinese Cinderella” and “the first written Cinderella”. I have carried out an analysis of the tale to demonstrate that the motifs of this narrative, which have been usually ascribed by scholars to Tang culture, are in fact hardly compatible with it. Moreover, the story presents a broken narrative structure and unclear elements which disclose the difficulties of adaptation of foreigner motifs to Chinese culture. These data indicate that this text is a combination of previous narratives containing Cinderella motifs, thus making Ye Xian the first version containing all the elements present in the modern Cinderella. In order to complete this analysis I have utilised three methodological perspectives, Classicists’, Sinologists’ and Folklorists’ approaches, according to the three different types of narratives investigated, to study this story and its role in the Cinderella cycle. ...
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Chinese Studies (Hanxue yanjiu漢學研究) vol. 37, no. 4 , 2019
The story of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty 梁武帝 (r. 502-549) rescuing his wife Lady Xi 郗氏 from an unfortunate rebirth as a snake was a common subject in popular literature related to Buddhist beliefs in late imperial China. Its history can be dated back to the twelfth century, when it quickly spread throughout the country. It is interpreted as a foundation of monastic Buddhist rites for the salvation of the dead, and it has also appeared as a narrative used in ritual storytelling and drama in several areas of China. Although Lady Xi's story played a major role in the dissemination of Buddhist ideas and rituals among the common folk, its history and cultural impact still remain understudied. The present paper explores the development of Lady Xi's story in the particular literary form of baojuan 寶卷 (precious scrolls) with the focus on 漢學研究第 37 卷第 4 期 2 performance traditions of southern Jiangsu. It compares three different recensions of the Baojuan of the Liang Emperor that represent two distinct periods in the development of the baojuan genre (the so-called "sectarian" scriptures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the "folk" narrative texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), as well as two regional traditions (Northern China and Wu dialect-speaking areas of Jiangsu). The evolution of this subject shows how elements of historical narrative were incorporated into Buddhist ritual storytelling. The article also demonstrates the connections between differences in the contents of the recensions with their functions in ritualized performances based on information from contemporary recitations of this baojuan in southern Jiangsu.
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The " Supplementary " Historian? Li Zhao's Guo shi bu as Mid-Tang Political and Social Critique
T’oung Pao, 2017
This article examines the Tang dynasty anecdote collection Guo shi bu 國史補 (Supplement to the History of the State), compiled by Li Zhao 李肇 (?-after 827) in part as a critique of imperial government and elite social mores of the early decades of the ninth century. A quantitative analysis of topic frequency and distribution in the collection reveals Li Zhao's techniques for depicting the corruption or political brilliance of the reigns of Tang emperors, as well as his admiration of powerful aristocratic clans, and his disdain for social climbing, perspectives that likely stemmed from his experiences as an official in Xianzong's court and his elite family background. Understanding the organization, underlying themes, and structure of individual anecdotes of the Guo shi bu allows us to see the ways that anecdotes and " miscellaneous " histories ultimately shaped official accounts of the Tang dynasty. Résumé Cet article examine la collection d'anecdotes d'époque Tang Guo shi bu 國史補 (supplément à l'histoire de l'Etat) compilée par Li Zhao 李肇 (?-après 827), et la considère en partie comme une critique du gouvernement impérial et des moeurs des élites au début du IX e siècle. Une analyse quantitative des thèmes traités, dans leur fréquence et leur répartition au sein de l'ouvrage permet de révéler les techniques mises en oeuvre par Li Zhao pour décrire la corruption ou le rayonnement politique
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