Strange Tales from Edo

Rewriting Chinese Fiction in Early Modern Japan William D. Fleming

In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan’s engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Largescale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices—the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding— in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers.

Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting—hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation—that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.

William D. Fleming is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

September · cloth · 300 pages

6 x 9 · $49.95x

Literary Studies

9780674293809

8 illus., 6 tables

Harvard East Asian Monographs

Harvard University Asia Center

Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE

Robert Ford Campany

Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience?

In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.

Robert Ford Campany is Professor of Asian and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University.

Available · 336 pages

6 x 9 · $59.95x cloth · $32.95x paper

Philosophy / History cloth: 9780674293724 paper: 9780674293731

Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series

Harvard University Asia Center distributed books   53