For many years, the oral performing and dramatic literatures of China from 1200 to 1600 CE were considered some of the most difficult texts in the Chinese corpus. They included ballad medleys, comic farces, Yuan music dramas, Ming music dramas, and the novel Shuihu zhuan. The Japanese scholars who first dedicated themselves to study these works in the mid-twentieth century were considered daring. As late as 1981, no comprehensive dictionary or glossary for this literature existed in any language, Asian or Western. A Glossary of Words and Phrases fills this gap for Western readers, allowing even a relative novice who has resonable command of Chinese to read, translate, and appreciate this great body of literature with an ease undreamed of even two decades ago. The Glossary is organized into approximately 8,000 entries based on the reading notes and glosses found in various dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and editions of works from the period. Main entries are listed alphabetically in the pinyin romanization system. In addition to glosses, entries include symbolic annotations, guides to pronunciation, and text citations. The result is a broadly useful glossary serving the needs of students of this literature as well as scholars researching Jin and Yuan language and its usage.

An indispensable tool for librarians who do reference or collection management, this work is a pioneering offering of expertly selected print and electronic reference tools for East Asian Studies (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Handbook for Asian Studies Specialists: A Guide to Research Materials and Collection Building Tools is the first work to cover reference works for the main Asian area languages of China, Japan, and Korea. Several leading Asian Studies librarians have contributed their many decades of experience to create a resource that gathers major reference titles—both print and online—that would be useful to today's Asian Studies librarian. Organized by language group, it offers useful information on the many subscription-based and open-source electronic tools relevant to Asian Studies. This book will serve as an essential resource for reference collections at academic libraries. Previously published bibliographies on materials deal with China or Japan or Korea, but none have coalesced information on all three countries into one work, or are written in English. And unlike the other resources available, this work provides the insight needed for librarians to make informed collection management decisions and reference selections.

This anthology features translations of ten seminal plays written during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), a period considered the golden age of Chinese theater. By turns lyrical and earthy, sentimental and ironic, Yuan drama spans a broad emotional, linguistic, and stylistic range. Combining sung arias with declaimed verses and doggerels, dialogues and mime, and jokes and acrobatic feats, Yuan drama formed a vital part of China's culture of performance and entertainment in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. To date, few Yuan-dynasty plays have been translated into English. Well-known translators and scholars have supervised the making of this collection and add a short description to each play. A general introduction situates all selections within their cultural and historical contexts.

This magnificent collection of eleven early [1250–1450] Chinese plays will give readers a vivid sense of life and a clear understanding of dramatic literature during an extraordinarily eventful period in Chinese history. Not only are the eleven plays in this volume expertly translated into lively, idiomatic English; they are each provided with illuminating, scholarly introductions that are yet fully intelligible to the educated lay reader. A marvelous volume.--Victor Mair, University of Pennsylvania

A discharged official in mid-Ming China faced significant changes in his life. This book explores three such officials in the sixteenth century—Wang Jiusi, Kang Hai, and Li Kaixian—who turned to literary endeavors when forced to retire. Instead of the formal writing expected of scholar-officials, however, they chose to engage in the stigmatized genre ofqu (songs), a collective term for drama and sanqu. As their efforts reveal, a disappointing end to an official career and a physical move away from the center led to their embrace of qu and the pursuit of a marginalized literary genre. This book also attempts to sketch the largely unknown literary landscape of mid-Ming north China. After their retirements, these three writers became cultural leaders in their native regions. Wang, Kang, and Li are studied here not as solitary writers but as central figures in the “qu communities” that formed around them. Using such communities as the basic unit in the study of qu allows us to see how sanqu and drama were produced, transmitted, and “used” among these writers, things less evident when we focus on the individual.

Wilt Idema is one of the world's leading scholars and translators of Chinese literature, with research interests ranging from classical poetry to premodern fiction, performance literature and women's writing. His oeuvre is exceptional in its inclusiveness and its ability to let different historical periods, genres and issues speak to one another, and to make the riches of Chinese literature accessible to a wide range of readers. In honor of his work, this collection brings together new research by twenty-two prominent scholars in a field of tremendous scope and diversity, on topics including genre characteristics, literary representations of social and political history, gender and cultural identity, music, autobiography, women's writing, internet literature and more.