Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio
By the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the collections of "zhiguai" and "chuanqi" materials had been widely reprinted and supplemented by contemporary works. Judith Zeitlin suggests that the accounts of the strange "inevitably began to lose their sense of novelty and to seem stereotype..." and such writers as Pu Songling therefore needed to renew the category of "strange." His anomalous collection of short pieces, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, which amalgamated "zhiguai "features with other styles, was left unfinished at his death in 1715