The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature

The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature. Edited by Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen. Cambridge, Eng. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 2 vols. Pp. xxxii + 711; xxi + 793. HC: USD $335 the set.Responding to the same general need as The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (2001), this Cambridge History seeks to serve as a reference work for the nonspecialist, the neophyte, and the specialist scholar.1 In many ways it succeeds where the Columbia History failed to satisfy; in a few regards even this magnificent accomplishment may not meet all expectations. In contrast to the numerous unrelated and somewhat overlapping essays in the Columbia volume, The Cambridge History is the work of very few hands, nearly all senior scholars recognized as preeminent leaders in their respective fields. Including the editors, they number only seventeen; their widely differing areas of expertise encompass to a remarkable degree the span covered here, from the earliest times to the present. Their essays are generally very long, from around sixty pages to well over 100; the few quite short contributions are reserved for topics that evolved over time and are thus less identified with a particular period (such as "Dunhuang Narratives" in Volume I, "Sinophone Writings and the Chinese Diaspora" in Volume ?). Several overlap slightly, yet they only rarely refer to each other. Together they mesh to provide a comprehensive and coherent introduction to the three millennia of literary production in Chinese. One goal (I, xvi) was to allow cover-to-cover reading; doing so has been a highly rewarding experience.The organizing scheme was intended to avoid simple repetition of conventional generic and period divisions by "mov[ing] toward a more integrated historical approach, creating a cultural history or a history of literary culture" (I, xvi). To this end, Volume I divides the Tang into four periods (the reigns of Empress Wu and Xuanzong, "After the Rebellion [756-791]," the mid-Tang, "Last Flowering," and the fall of the Tang); Volume ? divides Ming literature into "Early Ming to 1450," 14501520, 1520-1572, and Late Ming, 1573-1644, for example. Narrative of the Tang is also broken up by a short section on Buddhist literature; the late Ming section is further divided into considerations of the history of the book, "Fiction and the Merchant Elite/ and drama. The Six Dynasties period is parceled out to chapters that correspond roughly to centuries by the Western calendar. Each chapter is generally very well integrated to facilitate the extensive reading envisioned by the editors; each endeavors to include mention of all literary activity within its scope.Volume I was edited by Stephen Owen; it covers writing in Chinese from the earliest inscriptions until the development of a "fully evolved commercial print culture" around 1375. Its brief introduction identifies the subject of this lengthy study (not only the literature produced in Chinese by Han Chinese communities, but also the ways that this literature has been interpreted over the last two millennia as the past was regularly being recreated for changing purposes) and explains that it selfconsciously favors the English reader. That is, all titles are given in English translation, with the Romanized Chinese title provided only on first occurrence. The editors also argue convincingly for combining discussion of all genres and styles of writing of a period, whether "classical" or "vernacular."The first- and at 115 pages, the longest- chapter in Vol. I, by Martin Kern, is a detailed and yet highly readable survey of early literature in a very broad sense of the term, encompassing writing that uses the techniques of poetry or that is structured narrative regardless of how it was categorized later. He begins with the origins of the writing system (explaining characters as "logographs, writing the words of the Chinese language" that reflect the sounds of those words more essentially than ideas or pictured actions, 3); throughout the chapter he demonstrates- very convincinglythe intimate relationship between the spoken language and its written representation. …