Author: Lu Hsun; Gladys and Hsien-yi Yang, Translators

About: A Brief History of Chinese Fiction grew out of the lecture notes Lu Hsun used when teaching a course on Chinese fiction at Peking University between 1920 and 1924. In December 1923 a first volume was printed and in June 1924 a second volume. In September 1925 these were reprinted as one book. In 1930 the author made certain changes, but all subsequent editions have remained the same.

“The Historical Development of Chinese Fiction” in the Appendix served as notes for a series of lectures Lu Hsun gave at a Xian summer school in July 1924. The preface to the Japanese edition appeared first in the edition published in 1955 by the Sairosha Press, Tokyo, Japan.

This translation has been made from the Complete Works of Lu Hsun published by the People's Literature Publishing House: A Brief History of Chinese Fiction can be found in Volume 9, while the preface to the Japanese edition comes from the second series of Essays of Chieh-chieh-ting in Volume 6.

Excerpt:

The Sung dynasty story-tellers' scripts and the Yuan and Ming novels have always been popular with the common people and very numerous, but they were never listed in official histories. Only Wang Chi and Kao Ju of the Ming dynasty in their bibliographies, Hsu Wen Hsien Tung Kao (Sequel to Studies in Ancient Bibliographies) and Pai Chuan Shu Chih (Hundred Rivers Bibliographical Notes), mention The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Shui Hu Chuan. Chien Tseng at the beginning of the Ching dynasty in his bibliography, Yeh Shih Yuan Shu Mu, mentions three popular romances including the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and sixteen Sung dynasty tales including Mother Lamp-Wick. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Shui Hu Chuan were considered as proper writings because they were printed by the censorate of the Ming government in the sixteenth century, and that was why they were included in Ming bibliographies; but subsequently they were omitted again. And Chien Tseng included those novels in his list simply because he was a collector who valued old editions of these works — not because he appreciated their true value and deliberately broke the old conventions. The historians' point of view has remained unchanged from the Han dynasty to the present day; and as bibliography is after all a branch of historical science, we cannot expect bibliographers to break their own rules.