This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

An insightful look into contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction and the problem of Chinese postmodernity

The Li sao (also known as Encountering Sorrow), attributed to the poet-statesman Qu Yuan (4th–3rd century BCE), is one of the cornerstones of the Chinese poetic tradition. It has long been studied as China's first extended allegory in poetic form, yet most scholars agree that there is very little in the two-thousand-year-old tradition of commentary on it that convincingly explains its supernatural flights, its complex floral imagery, or the gender ambiguity of its primary poetic persona. The Shaman and the Heresiarch is the first book-length study of the Li sao in English, offering new translations of both the Li sao and the Nine Songs. The book traces the shortcomings of the earliest extant commentary on those texts, that of Wang Yi, back to the quasi-divinatory methods of the highly politicized tradition of Chinese classical hermeneutics in general, and the political machinations of a Han dynasty empress dowager in particular. It also offers an entirely new interpretation of the Li sao, one based not on Qu Yuan hagiography but on what late Warring States period artifacts and texts, including recently unearthed texts, teach us about the cultural context that produced the poem. In that light we see in the Li sao not only a reflection of the era of the great classical Chinese philosophers, but also the breakdown of the political-religious order of the ancient state of Chu.

She was originally a direct descendant of the Prime Minister's Estate. She should have lived a prosperous and prosperous life, but her fate had played with her. Not only did it not enter the eyes of his parents, it was also humiliating and tormenting them endlessly, to the point where the servants were shameless. The inconspicuous Bai Ling Yan had angered the Prime Minister, who had been framed that year. His infamous night had spread across the entire Great River, angering the Prime Minister. However, he was saved by the Old Madame and eventually abandoned by his distant relatives. After suffering so much in the human world, and finally returning to the Prime Minister's Mansion, and once again encountering the conspiracy of a scoundrel, what would happen to the situation then?

After a year of marriage, in order to protect the White Moonlight in his heart, the scumbag guy did not hesitate to lie to her. After the White Moonlight returned, the scumbag guy set a trap for her, causing her to lose her reputation and leave her house. He was the high and mighty CEO of the Royal Sky Corporation, and he waved his hands to turn the tide. She was bruised and battered; he was cruel and cruel, and he reached out and lifted her out of the dust. He doted on her everywhere and helped her to take off her impotent clothes. In the fashion industry, once she faced Lingyun, it also caused her to have a whole lifetime of feelings towards him. However, on the eve of receiving the certificate, she had been forced to swallow a pregnancy drop. Three years later, he returned with his legal wife and a little boy in tow.