A Brief History of Chinese Fiction
1959 Translation
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| Author | Lu Xun |
|---|---|
| Original title | 中國小說史略 Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue |
| Translator | Gladys Yang, Yang Xianyi |
| Series | China Knowledge Series |
| Subject | Chinese fiction |
| Published | 1930 |
A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Chinese: 中國小說史略; pinyin: Zhōngguó xiǎoshuō shǐlüè) is a book written by Lu Xun as a survey of traditional Chinese fiction. It was first published in Classical Chinese in 1930, then translated into Japanese, Korean, German, and then into English in 1959 by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi. It was the first survey of Chinese fiction to be published in China, and has been influential in shaping later scholarship.
The coverage extends from early myths and legends through the zhiguai stories of the Six Dynasties, the chuanqi stories of the Tang and Song dynasties, the vernacular stories of the following dynasties, and late Qing novels. The scholar John C. Y. Wang finds the study is still “significant and enduring” in providing a strong interpretive framework and detailed presentations of many previously neglected works, but also that it has obvious shortcomings, such as overemphasis on early forms of fiction, not enough coverage of later forms, such as the bianwen and vernacular short stories.
in 1920 Peking University invited Lu Xun to give a course on the history of Chinese literature. A draft version based on his lecture notes was issued in two parts in 1923 and 1924, then in a combined volume in 1925, which was reprinted five times. Lu Xun revised it for publication in 1930. The work was quickly translated into Japanese, then over the following decades into Japanese again, then into English, German, and Korean. WorldCat, the international catalog, lists 175 editions in Chinese and Japanese published from 1925 to 2012 and 54 editions in English from 1959 to 2014.
Robert Hegel, in a review of the study of Chinese fiction, notes that Lu Xu had "far less than the complete corpus of classical Chinese fiction" available to him, and there were many items to which he did not have access. The dominant genres of the Tang, the bianwen and pinghua, he continues, had only begun to be rediscovered and few readers understood their historical significance. Hegel concludes that While Lu Xun's critical insights into individual works remain useful, Brief History, "while still thought-provoking, is far from sufficient as an introduction to the field now, seventy years later."
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