front cover of The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave
The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave
A Generic Study of The Story of the Stone
Chi Xiao
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Lyricism in poetry dominated the Chinese literary tradition for three millenia. Lyric aesthetics captured the world in verse, and compelled people to seek the totalistic behind the contingent, the abiding behind the fluid, and the perfect behind the incomplete. The development of the novel and the cultural milieu that produced it, however, rendered this lyric ideal more prosaic, both in everyday life and in literature.
The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave places The Story of the Stone in relation to this history. Read as an allegory of the fate of lyricism, The Stone is a parodic response to both the lyrical phenomena in the literary and social worlds and the cosmological beliefs on which Chinese lyricism is based. Thus we can trace the social life of lyricism through different cultural zones: the world where the novel was produced, the world of fiction, and the narrative universe of the story itself. The garden, in both the novel and cultural tradition, is a link between all three zones.
Chi Xiao breaks new ground in understanding The Story of the Stone, blending his extensive knowledge of traditional Chinese fiction with a remarkably crafted history of the garden as an enduring feature of elite Chinese life. By focusing on the role of the garden in The Stone, Xiao Chi reveals the special linkages between the world of fiction, the world that produced the novel, and the narrative universe of the story itself.
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front cover of Red Chamber, World Dream
Red Chamber, World Dream
Actors, Audience, and Agendas in Chinese Foreign Policy and Beyond
Jing Sun
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Chinese president Xi Jinping is most famously associated with his “Chinese Dream” campaign, envisioning a great rejuvenation of the nation. Many observers, though, view China’s pursuit of this dream as alarming. They see a global power ready to abandon its low-profile diplomacy and eager to throw its weight around.
 
Red Chamber, World Dream represents an interdisciplinary effort of deciphering the Chinese Dream and its global impact. Jing Sun employs methods from political science and journalism and concepts from literature, sociology, psychology and drama studies, to offer a multilevel analysis of various actors’ roles in Chinese foreign policy making: the leaders, the bureaucrats, and its increasingly diversified public. This book rejects a simple dichotomy of an omnipotent, authoritarian state versus a suppressed society. Instead, it examines how Chinese foreign policy is constantly being forged and contested by interactions among its leaders, bureaucrats, and people. The competition for shaping China’s foreign policy also happens on multiple arenas: intraparty fighting, inter-ministerial feuding, social media, TV dramas and movies, among others. This book presents vast amounts of historical detail, many unearthed the first time in the English language. Meanwhile, it also examines China’s diplomatic responses to ongoing issues like the Covid-19 crisis. The result is a study multidisciplinary in nature, rich in historical nuance, and timely in contemporary significance.

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front cover of The Story of Stone
The Story of Stone
Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West
Jing Wang
Duke University Press, 1992
In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition—all concerning stones endowed with magical properties—Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang’s thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature.
Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese culture. Uniting classical Chinese studies with contemporary Western theoretical concerns, Wang examines these stone narratives by analyzing intertextuality within Chinese traditions. She offers revelatory interpretations to long-standing critical issues, such as the paradoxical character of the monkey in The Journey to the West, the circularity of narrative logic in The Dream of the Red Chamber, and the structural necessity of the stone tablet in Water Margin.
By both challenging and incorporating traditional sinological scholarship, Wang’s The Story of Stone reveals the ideological ramifications of these three literary works on Chinese cultural history and makes the past relevant to contemporary intellectual discourse. Specialists in Chinese literature and culture, comparative literature, literary theory, and religious studies will find much of interest in this outstanding work, which is sure to become a standard reference on the subject.
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