About this Title

Volume 2 is the first comprehensive portrayal of the development of the Chinese novel towards the end of the Empire, i.e. from the16th century to 1911. Novels such as “Der Traum der roten Kammer” (“The Dream of the Red Chamber”) and “Jin Ping Mei”, to name but two of the very few specimens known in the west, belong to a tradition that has its roots in the 16th century. Thomas Zimmer analyses the emergence of the novel in its various forms, the historical network of textual references as well as the realization of literary topics developed throughout the centuries. Because authors used to be anonymous and the genre as such managed played only a marginal role, the precise development of the early novel remains rather hazy. Thanks to a major cultural movement, however, fiction as literary art gained increasing social relevance as of the late 16th and 17th century. The crisis triggered by the governmental shift from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty caused a change in the development of the Chinese novel. Around the mid-18th century, a certain autobiographical sensitisation could be perceived; the turn from the 18th to the 19th coincided with a growing tendency to adapt contemporary phenomena. Roughly 100 years later, this development culminated in the savage criticism of the ruling powers in state and society. The impact of the traditional Chinese novel reaches well into our age.

Reviews

"Wie der erste, von Wolfgang Kubin selbst verfasste Band zur chinesischen Lyrik darf auch der zweite Band schon jetzt als Standardwerk eingestuft werden. Wer sich einen Überblick über 'den Roman' in China verschaffen möchte, muss ihn lesen."

--Mitteilungsblatt der deutschen Chinagesellschaft, Bochum, Nr. 2, 2003