Tales of Heartburn: Literati Storytelling in Late Nineteenth-Century China

Revolutionizes our understanding of the classical tale collections in late nineteenth-century China by reading them in their specific historical and social contexts.

This book offers the first systematic textual analyses and translations of classical tale collections, the so-called xin qishuo 新奇說 (new tales of the extraordinary) published by one of China's first modern newspaper houses, Shenbaoguan, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. With a focus on Xuan Ding's 1877 collection of classical tales, Recorded by Autumn Lamp on Rainy Nights, and drawing also from other contemporary collections for comparison, the book examines how these commercially successful yet critically neglected narratives imaginatively reformed indigenous literary traditions, especially the age-old genres of zhiguai (records of the strange) and chuanqi (tales of the marvelous). In addition to providing incisive commentaries on contemporary social and political turmoil, these tales also gave poignant expression to the trauma and aftermath of one of the most devastating civil wars in human history, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), which cost twenty to thirty million lives and spread destruction across central and southern China. The book reveals how these late nineteenth-century classical tales mediated between commercial interests and sociopolitical criticism, problematizing gender, class, ethnic tensions, and literati discontent while offering a creative expression of resistance to cultural and political hegemony. They were not only historically significant for having exhibited early impulses for an indigenous literary modernization but also artistically sophisticated when seen against the background of the late Qing commercial printing boom and the transformation of early modern Chinese intellectual culture.