Traditional Chinese fiction and fiction commentary
Subtitle: reading and writing between the lines
By: David L. Rolston.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng; chi
Number of pages: 428
Subjects: Chinese fiction -- History and criticism; Chinese fiction -- Book reviews
Description: "In the Ming and Qing periods, the Chinese read fiction in editions with extensive commentary printed on the same page as the fiction itself. This commentary was concerned less with helping the reader understand the 'letter' of the text than with drawing the reader's attention to its more notable aspects through emphatic punctuation (similar to our underlining, italics, or highlighting) and evaluative comments. Authors developed four different approaches to the challenges this type of commentary presented: they wrote their own commentary; they modeled aspects of their narrators on fiction commentators; they left space in their texts for readers to compose their own commentaries; or they combined these approaches. This book is the first concerted effort to see how the existence of the commentary tradition affected the development of Chinese fiction." -- Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [351]-382) and index.