Changes at Poetry NZ

Alistair Paterson, ed.: Poetry NZ 22 (March 2001)

I'm happy to announce that, at a meeting at Massey University's Albany Campus on 26th November 2013, an agreement was reached between the Head of the School of English and Media Studies, A/Prof Joe Grixti, Poetry NZ's managing editor Alistair Paterson, and production manager John Denny, for the future housing of the magazine by the university.

The new managing editor, in succession to Alistair, will be yours truly. I was featured in issue 22 in 2001, and I guest-edited issue 38 in 2009, which (I hope) qualifies me for such a task - though I don't pretend to claim that I could ever adequately fill Alistair's shoes: he's certainly a hard act to follow!

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ 38 (March 2009)

But what precisely is Poetry NZ? New Zealand's most celebrated (as well as longest lived) poetry journal has been appearing twice a year since the end of the 80s, when it was started by Oz Kraus, initially with a series of guest editors, but then - from issue 8 onwards - under the editorship of distinguished poet, anthologist, fiction-writer and critic Alistair Paterson.

Jan Kemp: Alistair Paterson

In another, truer sense, though, one could argue that the magazine actually started in 1951, when Louis Johnson began publishing his annual New Zealand Poetry Yearbook. That would make it the country's second-oldest surviving literary journal, after Landfall, founded by Charles Brasch in 1947. Johnson's series stopped in 1964, but a bi-annual version of the (re-christened) Poetry New Zealand was revived by Frank McKay in the 1970s and 80s and ran to six issues, each helmed by a different guest editor.

Louis Johnson (1924-1988)

Poetry NZ, in its present form, has now reached issue 47, with a 48th (to be guest-edited by Nicholas Reid) promised for next month. Longtime publisher John Denny of Puriri Press no longer feels able to undertake the myriad duties associated with the production and distribution of the magazine, however, so it seemed like a good moment to re-examine Poetry NZ's future as one of New Zealand's very few journals dedicated entirely to poetry and poetics.

Alphabet Book (Puriri Press)

I will, fortunately, be assisted in my task by an advisory board including academic and editor Dr Thom Conroy; poet and academic Dr Jen Crawford; publisher and printer John Denny; poet and academic Dr Ingrid Horrocks; poet and 2013 Burns Fellow David Howard; poet and editor Alistair Paterson ONZM; poet and academic Dr Tracey Slaughter; and poet and academic A/Prof Bryan Walpert.

From issue 49 onwards, our intention is to revert to Louis Johnson's original concept of an annual poetry yearbook, approximately twice the size of the present 112-page issues, but retaining the magazine's essential characteristics, such as the featured poet, the reviews section, at least one substantial essay per issue, and - of course - a substantial selection from the poetry submitted to us by local and international authors.

Alistair Paterson, ed.: Poetry NZ 25 (September 2002)

I think that all three of us, Alistair, John and myself, feel that it would be a tragedy for New Zealand poetry if this journal were to cease to appear. Where else can such a substantial cross-section of our poets rub shoulders with writers from all over the world? Where else can we debate the important question of what (if anything) defines a national poetry (or poetics)?

Hopefully having a new institutional home will enable Poetry NZ to continue its already sixty-year-old engagement with such questions in the confidence that it will never become an in-house university publication. Like Landfall, so ably supported by the University of Otago, Poetry NZ will retain its proud independence, but also benefit from the resources of one of New Zealand's largest tertiary institutions (this year celebrating its 21st birthday here on our Auckland campus) ...

Massey's Albany Campus

Existing subscribers will be sent a copy of the enlarged issue no. 49 at no additional cost. Thereafter, though, new subscription arrangements will have to be made. Full details will be published in issue 48, and thereafter made public on the Poetry NZ website.

The most obvious change for the moment will be the fact that we'll now be open to electronic submissions (with "poetry nz" in the subject line) via email text and MSWord file attachments - in fact, that will become our preferred way to receive work. More details on that, too, later.

Alistair Paterson, ed.: Poetry NZ 47 (September 2013)

The True Story of the Novel (7): The Modern Novel

Gustave Doré: Don Quixote and Sancho Setting Out (1863)

One of the best university courses I ever did was a lecture series on the eighteenth-century novel, with Dr Jonathan Lamb. It must have been about thirty years ago: in 1982, I think - shortly before he forsook Auckland university for the brighter lights of the United States, in any case.

Jonathan Lamb (2011)

His idea was to trace the "Cervantine novel" from its origins in Don Quixote; thence to Fielding's Shamela, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones; and finally on to Smollett's Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker, with side-excursions into Hogarth and Le Sage - though not, interestingly, Defoe or Richardson. I'd been expecting something far more akin to Ian Watts' standard doctrine of the rise of the bourgeois novel, whereas this offered a whole new perspective on the (so-called) "picaresque" novel of incident. Fielding's idea of the novel as a "comic epic in prose" was much to the fore, as I recall.

I don't how original this approach actually was, but it seemed brilliantly insightful to me at the time, and offered me a whole new way of thinking about a series of books I'd previously known mainly as the contents of a cupboard in David Copperfield's house:

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time ...

Henry Fielding's Grave (Lisbon)

I guess that's what started me off questioning Ian Watt's account of the Rise of the Novel. Successive unsuccessful attempts to read Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa did contrast rather sharply with the entertainment and profit I found in such works as The Golden Ass, The Tale of Genji, and The Red Chamber Dream, not one of which could be regarded as a "novel" according to Watts's somewhat reductionist genealogy.

In short, if the coveted title of "first novelist" came down to a stark choice between Samuel Richardson and Lady Murasaki (ignoring for a moment the prior claims of Apuleius or Heliodorus), I was always going to vote for the Japanese candidate. Watts's vision (somewhat inevitably, given the fact that his book first appeared in 1957) seemed to culminate in the stultifying confines of the pre-60s British novel: John Braine, C. P. Snow, Muriel Spark, and even duller apostles of the middle class tea-&-adultery-in-the-provinces school.

The vistas opened up for me by Jonathan Lamb (together with my own reading in the non-European fictional traditions of Arabia, China, Iceland, India, Japan, Persia) appeared to offer a far more fruitful explanation of the magic realism and postmodern game-playing which had come to characterise the novels of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

So if it's that obvious that Watts's schema is inadequate, why has it taken so long for people to wake up to the fact? Why do people still teach his outdated doctrines in so many schools and universities?

Masafuera Island (1773)

Well, one partial answer - sheer ignorance - is given in the essay "Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude," by American novelist Jonathan Franzen, published in the New Yorker in 2011. Franzen begins with a brief account of his personal experience of the boredom and alienation of modern life:

... every morning the same revving doses of nicotine and caffeine; every evening the same assault on my e-mail queue; every night the same drinking for the same brain-dulling pop of pleasure. At a certain point, having read about Masafuera [the island on which the alleged model for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, was marooned - or, rather, marooned himself - from 1704 to 1709], I began to imagine running away and being alone there, like Selkirk, in the interior of the island, where nobody lives even seasonally.

Carl Scottsberg: The Ruin of a Hut On Masafuera (1924)

No doubt with his eventual essay already in mind, he is careful to take with him a copy of Defoe's novel:

I also thought it might be good, while I was there, to reread the book generally considered to be the first English novel [my italics]. “Robinson Crusoe” was the great early document of radical individualism, the story of an ordinary person’s practical and psychic survival in profound isolation. The novelistic enterprise associated with individualism — the search for meaning in realistic narrative — went on to become the culture’s dominant literary mode for the next three centuries. Crusoe’s voice can be heard in the voice of Jane Eyre, the Underground Man, the Invisible Man, and Sartre’s Roquentin.

That list of places where Crusoe's voice "can be heard" - in novels by (respectively) Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ralph Ellison (presumably: rather than H. G. Wells), and Jean-Paul Sartre - sounds impressively erudite. One can't help wondering, though, if it's linguistic and cultural diversity isn't intended as some kind of corrective to an previous list in another essay by Franzen, "Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books," where he came clean about his own problems with some of the more difficult nuts to crack in the canon of world fiction:

Even as an adult, I consider myself a slattern of a reader. I have started (in many cases, more than once) "Moby-Dick," "The Man Without Qualities," "Mason & Dixon," "Don Quixote," "Remembrance of Things Past," "Doctor Faustus," "Naked Lunch," "The Golden Bowl," and "The Golden Notebook" without coming anywhere near finishing them. Indeed, by a comfortable margin, the most difficult book I ever voluntarily read in its entirety was Gaddis's nine-hundred-and-fifty-six-page first novel, "The Recognitions."

Jonathan Franzsen & Oprah Winfrey

It's seldom a great idea to confess to your own ignorance. I haven't read all of the above either, but I'm not going to tell you which ones are still sitting on the ol' too-hard pile. More to the point, however, Franzen's infamous dissing of Oprah Winfrey, after she had selected his breakthrough novel The Corrections for her book club in 2001 (she responded by unselecting it), had given him a rep as an uppity intellectual snob, which he seemed - back then, at any rate - eager to correct. Later he appears to have decided just to go with it. You can never feign enough dumbness to satisfy the truly dumb. To return to the "Robinson Crusoe" essay, though, Franzen continues to elaborate on his theme of the dullness of existence for quite some time:

... there persisted, in the very word “novel,” with its promise of novelty, a memory of more youthful experiences so engrossing that I could sit quietly for hours and never think of boredom. Ian Watt, in his classic “The Rise of the Novel,” correlated the eighteenth-century burgeoning of novelistic production with the growing demand for at-home entertainment by women who’d been liberated from traditional household tasks and had too much time on their hands. In a very direct way, according to Watt, the English novel had risen from the ashes of boredom.

Really? I think Ian Watt might be a bit surprised to read this précis of his argument, but it is at least interesting to discover that: 1/ the novel arose primarily as a response to boredom (doesn't all literature? one is tempted to add); and 2/ since middle-class women weren't any longer more usefully employed by doing chores, and therefore had "too much time on their hands," it became necessary to produce novels for them instead.

This evidence-free set of assertions (which unfortunately founders on the rock of the innumerable pre-eighteenth century novels of all kinds chronicled with such relentless industry by Steven Moore in his 2,000 page tome The Novel: An Alternative History) unfortunately signals another dominant theme in Franzen's writing: misognyny.

Here are some choice plums from Franzen's New Yorker piece on turn-of-the-century American female novelist Edith Wharton:

Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty.

That her ... twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely sexless was perhaps less a function of her looks than of her sexual ignorance.

Wharton might well be more congenial to us now, if alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.

[The House of Mirth] can be read … as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.

Edith Wharton

Franzen's bizarre line of argument prompted a response, "Not Pretty", by novelist Victoria Patterson in the LA Review of Books, where she complains that "He’d taken a literary hero and written about her as if ranking a Maxim photo spread”:

Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen? Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work. Franzen perpetuates the typically patriarchal standard of ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits, whether she is an intellectual, artist, politician, activist, or musician.

Jonathan Franzen

I don't myself have strong views on whether or not Franzen is really "anti-women" - though one can certainly find some hair-raising comments on the subject scattered throughout his oeuvre, not least in Freedom, his fourth novel. His diagnosis, quoted above, of the "origins" of the English novel (bored women with too much time on their hands), does, however, sound startlingly close to his explanation, in a radio interview, of just why he felt so uncomfortable about seeing Oprah's bookclub logo on the cover of The Corrections:

So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator or whatever. I worry — I'm sorry that it's, uh — I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say "If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it." Those are male readers speaking ...

Oink, oink, Mr. Franzen? "I had some hope of actually [my emphasis] reaching a male audience" -- not just those pesky females who squander their time reading "while men are off" doing manly things such as "golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator" ...

Be that as it may - returning to our starting-point, his essay on Robinson Crusoe and Aelxander Selkirk (with a few reflections on the recent suicide of his friend David Foster Wallace thrown in for good measure):

With three more days to fill and my knees worn out by downhill hiking, I had no choice but to start reading Samuel Richardson’s first novel, “Pamela,” which I’d brought along mainly because it’s a lot shorter than “Clarissa.” All I’d known about “Pamela” was that Henry Fielding had satirized it in “Shamela,” his own first venture into novel writing. I hadn’t known that “Shamela” was only one of many works published in immediate response to “Pamela,” and that “Pamela,” indeed, had been possibly the biggest news of any kind in London in 1741. But as soon as I started reading it I could see why: the novel is compelling and electric with sex and class conflicts, and it details psychological extremes at a level of specificity like nothing before it [my emphasis]. Pamela Andrews isn’t everything and more. She’s simply and uniquely Pamela, a beautiful servant girl whose virtue is under sustained and ingenious assault by the son of her late employer. Her story is told through her letters to her parents, and when she finds out that these letters are being intercepted and read by her would-be seducer, Mr. B., she continues to write them while knowing that Mr. B. will read them. Pamela’s piousness and self-dramatizing hysterics were bound to infuriate a certain kind of reader (one of the books published in response satirized Richardson’s subtitle, “Virtue Rewarded,” as “Feign’d Innocence Detected”), but underneath her strident virtue and Mr. B.’s lascivious machinations is a fascinatingly rendered love story. The realistic power of this story was what made the book such a groundbreaking sensation. Defoe had staked out the territory of radical individualism, which has remained a fruitful subject for novelists as late as Beckett and Wallace, but it was Richardson who first granted full fictional access to the hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else.

The Abduction of Clarissa

It all sounds so learned, so well-informed. He even knows the date of Pamela's publication! The fact that it was parodied by Fielding! Talk about an egghead! But the clincher comes when he explains why this was such a crucial first step for the novel:

The realistic power of this story was what made the book such a groundbreaking sensation.

No more or less "real" than Marivaux's Vie de Marianne (which he began publishing in 1731); far less psychologically insightful than Prévost's Manon Lescaut (1731), themselves much influenced by earlier English novels in the genre, such as Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87): "groundbreaking," then, in what sense?

Defoe had staked out the territory of radical individualism, which has remained a fruitful subject for novelists as late as Beckett and Wallace, but it was Richardson who first granted full fictional access to the hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else.

The "desert-island" narrative goes back at least as far as Homer's Odyssey (not to mention the colossally successful novelisation of his story by François Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque (1693-94)), though it's true that Defoe's particular version of it certainly did exercise a huge influence on subsequent European writers. It's that comment about how Richardson "first granted full fictional access to the hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else" which really grates on me, though. Has anyone ever shown greater insight into the "hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else" than Lady Murasaki, for instance? Actually, more to the point, few writers have ever shown less knowledge of the subject than Richardson, I would have thought. Have a quick squizz through his own self-proclaimed chef d'oeuvre Sir Charles Grandison (1753) and tell me that I'm wrong.

Sir Charles Grandison rescues Miss Byron

There's no shame in not having read all of these great novels which predated Defoe and Richardson - not much, even, in not even having heard of most of them: our educational system is monstrously, monotonously monolingual. If it wasn't written in English, then don't bother me with it, is the attitude of many professed experts on the subject even now.

Just as with Franzen's fatuous comments about Edith Wharton (nudge-nudge remarks about her sex-life or lack of same; man-of-the-world judgements on her "attractiveness"), it isn't so much the content of these (kind of foolish and offensive) opinions as the knowing, superior tone he affects which is really irritating. His adventures on the island of Masafuera are otherwise quite entertaining to read - and the stuff on Defoe and Richardson is (presumably) a fairly faithful summary of his lecture notes from Freshman English. But just please stop pretending to be well-informed on the subject.

To put it in terms that might make more sense to a birdwatcher as keen as Franzen, it's more or less the equivalent of claiming that birds were unknown in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Margaret Anne Doody: A Natural Passion (1974)

For all his unfortunate biases, though, Franzen at least has the virtue of actually being a novelist and knowing something about how they work (rather a fine one, too, I think, since I've somehow managed to read all four of his huge novels to date, not to mention his autobiography and one of his essay collections). There are deeper, darker sinners than he. You recall the responses to Margaret Anne Doody's own theories on the subject which I quoted from in my first piece on this topic?

When I gave a talk on the early novels and their influence on eighteenth-century literature ... in April 1993, I was asked during the question period "why I wanted to bash everything down to one level?" I had not hitherto thought of my thesis in that way, but I could see that, to anyone used to the Rise of the Novel as a story of hierarchy and spatial erection, my narrative could seem like a loss of attributed eminence.

Doody also quotes distinguished critic J. Paul Hunter to the effect that "getting rid of the categories 'Novel' and 'Romance' would be 'dangerous.' He expresses a fear of a 'new literary history built thoughtlessly on the rubble of the old'." She goes on to summarise his views as follows:

A change in the categories would be a kind of bomb, reducing structures to leveled rubble and encouraging the mushrooming of jerry-built hutments. ...

Margaret Anne Doody on the Great Wall of China

Who cares about the truth, after all? Ptolemaic astronomy was good enough for the Ancients; it's good enough for most practical purposes; what do we need with this new-fangled Copernican stuff about the earth going around the sun? It just unsettles people and forces us to revise all the textbooks ...

You may think I'm exaggerating, but anyone who's spent any time reading - or even just leafing through - Steven Moore's immense work on the novel from its origins until 1800 knows that the contention that Richardson and Defoe "began" the novel, or even the English novel, or even the English psychological realist novel is talking through his hat.

When the evidence is this overwhelming, it's time to dust off the lecture notes and acknowledge the paradigm-change. It does no favours to (especially) Defoe to see his writing in this way. He was a great novelist in his own right, not simply as a "precursor" or "progenitor" of later Man Alone-like, Robinsonade writers.

As for Richardson, I fear he's been forced down so many impressionable young readers' throats as a result of his undeserved reputation as the "father of the novel" that the unreadable wastes of Clarissa or Grandison have come to characterise all pre-nineteenth century fiction for them. Poor sods. They could have been reading Apuleius or the Genji instead - and would have enjoyed themselves a good deal more.

As Franzen puts it, so eloquently, above: "there persisted, in the very word 'novel,' with its promise of novelty, a memory of more youthful experiences so engrossing that I could sit quietly for hours and never think of boredom." Novels are not boring. That's their very essence: they're compounded of the latest novelties (hence the name) - whatever's currently most exciting, most engrossing, most titillating, most depraved ...

I know that a lot of novels are boring: dull, poorly constructed, hard to follow, vaguely plotted, simplistically motivated - but that's because they've failed in their prime directive of interesting readers. The pompous, hypocritical maunderings of Richardson are a perfect example of just such a failure. Critics often quote Dr. Johnson's remark to Boswell: "Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story … you would hang yourself … you must read him for the sentiment." They don't seem to understand that this is not exactly a ringing endorsement of their hero, though.

There's no real need to dethrone Richardson in order to appreciate the 2,000 years of novel writing that preceded him. Clarissa does appear, still, to have its fans - in fact it comes fourth in a recent Guardian listing of the 100 Best Novels [in English? They don't bother to specify], where it's praised for "the subtlety with which [Richardson] unfolds the dark tragedy of Clarissa's fatal attraction to Lovelace." Go figure. Personally I'd see all those hundreds and hundreds of pages of completely implausible letters concocted by his characters as about as psychologically "subtle" as John Bunyan's nuanced portrait of the Pope in the Pilgrim's Progress (no. 1 on the list):

Now I saw in my dream, that at the end of this valley lay blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone this way formerly; and while I was musing what should be the reason, I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, POPE and PAGAN, dwelt in old time; by whose power and tyranny the men whose bones, blood, and ashes, &c., lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered; but I have learnt since, that PAGAN has been dead many a day; and as for the other, though he be yet alive, he is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.

The Rhead Brothers: Illustrations to The Pilgrim's Progress

Great stuff! All I can say about Clarissa is that its magic passed me by. I saw a BBC dramatisation once which, by cutting out all the verbiage, did seem to get to the dark, grimy heart of the matter - but when I discovered that the villainous Lovelace was (if anything) a more tedious and logorrhoeic correspondent than his victim - I still find it difficult to understand how that's even possible - I concluded it was not for me.

I love novels. I like reading them, and I like trying to write them. I've published three of them, and have recently completed the first draft of a fourth. I simply do not accept Richardson as the great-grandaddy of the genre, and it's for that reason that I'll always be grateful to Jonathan Lamb for simply leaving him out of his account of the growth of the form, and starting with the fascinating metafictional complexities of Cervantes instead.

Cervantes (of course) did not consider himself to be originating a genre, either. So far as he was concerned, he was building a new edifice on the very well-established foundations laid by Heliodorus and the other classical novelists, not to mention their medieval and renaissance successors: Giovanni Boccaccio principal among them. For him, it was an old form which needed to be revivified. How can it be thought to have "begun" in 1741?

Abraham Bloemaert: Theagenes and Chariclea (1626)

There's an interesting clue to be found in John J. Winkler's fascinating 1985 book on Apuleius, Auctor & Actor, which I mentioned above in my post on the classical novel. In it he quotes from an essay by a certain B. A. Babcock on the various genres underlying the picaresque novel (or "romance", as he prefers to call it):

Underlying the episodic and antidevelopmental narrative of the picaresque is yet another important pattern of organization: the structure of the narrative genre (or genres) being parodied. While numerous critics have discussed the picaresque as "antiromance," as a "countergenre" that develops diacritically as an inversion of the pattern of chivalric romance, few have realized that it embodies the structures of the romance at the same time as it inverts them. The code which is being broken is always implicitly there [my emphasis], for every act of deconstructing reconstructs and reaffirms the structure of romance. This formal, generic, nondisjunction is central to the picaresque's problematic ambiguity: the pattern of expectation created by the inverted form (i.e. the picaresque) competes with the still somewhat operant, formal constraint of the genre or genres that have been inverted. in other words, the reader receives at least two sets of competing formal metacode signals: "this is a romance"; "this is a picaresque antiromance." As a consequence, even a reader familiar with the tradition is somewhat confused and frustrated, and the narrative "message" has an initial appearance of chaos.

- B. A. Babcock, "'Liberty's a Whore': Inversions, Marginalia, and Picaresque Narrative," in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. B. A. Babcock (Ithaca, NY, 1978): 99.
[Quoted in John J. Winkler, Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius's Golden Ass. 1985 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991): 271-72].

William-Adolphe Bouguereau: Cupid & Psyche (1889)

"The code which is being broken is always implicitly there" - that's the vital point to be gleaned from this passage, I think. Like Cervantes', Apuleius' novel functions as a parody of various pre-existing narrative genres: the confessional autobiography (like St. Augustine's); the episodic tale of implausible adventure (like Lucian's "True History," and his other narrative sketches - including "The Ass", which Apuleius's story may well have been based on); the supernatural tale (found in profusion in Petronius's earlier Satyricon), the allegorical fairy tale ("Cupid and Psyche"). But by parodying them, he also embodies them. Their conventions underlie his. Without recognition of these patterns, little sense can be made of the intention of his work. The same rule applies to Cervantes' "anti-romance." He didn't dislike romances (in fact he wrote two of them) - he simply saw an opportunity to mock their excesses and thus undermine their hegemony.

This rule also accounts for the success of Fielding's inversions of Richardson: Shamela, its sequel Joseph Andrews, and his masterpiece Tom Jones. The facile nature of his initial mockery of Pamela quickly grew into a realisation that it could provide him with a prototype for his "comic epic in prose." An inversion, by definition, contains both itself and the thing inverted, or else it would make no sense to the reader. We don't laugh at jokes unless we can easily spot their targets.

All novelists, in other words, work in the shadow of their immediate predecessors (as well as under the influence of more distant ancestors). Whether they seek to build on and perfect what has gone before (as Lady Murasaki did with the pre-existing monogatari tradition, or as Snorri and his contemporaries did with the oral family traditions of Iceland), or try to subvert and transform them (as Cervantes did with the chivalric romance, and Fielding with the novel of sentiment), they require a prior knowledge of these traditions in their readers before their innovations can make sense.

The fallacy lying behind Ian Watt's model of the Rise of the Novel (or the very literal and reductionist way in which it's been interpreted and propagated, at any rate), is that it tries to construct a kind of novelistic "Big Bang" in the early eighteenth century which has given rise to the fictional universes we now see around us. Such an event may well have taken place at some point in the past, but I fear that it must have predated literacy, since it has left few traces beyond the existence of an already thriving and sophisticated novel tradition in Ancient Greece and Rome - not to mention interesting hints of something similar in Egyptian narrative literature.

Given the tenuous nature of diffusionist models of literary transmission over evolutionary explanations of genre transformations, I'd prefer myself to postulate a "Steady State" theory of continual growth and renewal in that most natural - and certainly not least widespread - of human literary forms, the long prose narrative, or "novel."

•

To conclude, then, here are some of the more interesting stops in the development of the post-Cervantine novel:

Translation of Heliodorus (1560)

The Spanish Novel

Authors:

1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616)
2. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

_____________________________________

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616)


1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Obras Completas: Don Quijote de la Mancha / La Galatea / Los trabjaos de Persiles y Sigismunda / Las doce novelas ejemplares /Las once obras teatrales / Los once entremeses / Viaje del Parnaso / Poesías sueltas. Biografía de Lorenzo Hernáiz. Madrid: M. Aguilar, Editor, n.d. [c.1929].


2. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. 1605 & 1615. Ed. Martín de Ricquer. 1962. Clásicos Universales Planeta. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, S. A., 1994.


3. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha: Edicion conforme a la ultima corregida por la Academia Española, con la vida del autor y notas para la buena inteligencia del texto. 1605 & 1615. Paris: Librería de Garnier Hermanos, 1889.


4. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. 1605 & 1615. Ed. Martín de Ricquer. 1944. 2 vols. Colección “Libros de Bolsillo Z”, 4-5. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, S. A., 1979.


5. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. 1605 & 1615. Trans. P. Motteux. 1700-12. Introduction by J. G. Lockhart. 2 vols. Everyman’s Library, 385-86. 1906 & 1909. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1943.


6. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. The Adventures of Don Quixote. 1605 & 1615. Trans. J. M. Cohen. 1950. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.


7. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. 1605 & 1615. Trans. Edith Grossman. Introduction by Harold Bloom. 2003. Vintage Classics. London: Random House, 2005.


8. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Journey to Parnassus: Translated into English Tercets with Preface and Illustrative Notes, to which are Subjoined the Antique Text and Translation of the Letter of Cervantes to Mateo Vazquez. 1614. Trans. James Y. Gibson. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1883.


9. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Teatro Completo. Ed. Agustín Blánquez. 2 vols. Obras Maestras. Barcelona: Editorial Iberia, S. A., 1966.


10. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Exemplary Stories. Trans. C. A. Jones. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


11. Alpert, Michael, trans. Two Spanish Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes (Anon.) / The Swindler (El Buscón), Francisco de Quevedo. 1554 & 1626. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

Miguel de Cervantes: La Galatea (1585)

•


Longus: Les Amours pastorales de Daphnis et Chloé (1718)

The French Novel

Authors:

1. Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792)
2. Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803)
3. Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
4. François Fénelon (1651-1715)
5. Madame de La Fayette (1634-1693)
6. Alain-René Lesage (1668-1747)
7. Pierre de Marivaux (1688-1763)
8. Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791)
9. L'Abbé Prévost (1697-1763)
10. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814)
11. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

_____________________________________

Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792)


1. Cazotte, Jacques. Le Diable Amoureux. 1772. Ed. Max Milner. GF. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979.


Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803)


2. Choderlos de Laclos. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Maurice Allem. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 6. 1951. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.


3. Choderlos de Laclos. Les liaisons dangereuses. 1782. Ed. Jean Mistler. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1972.


4. Laclos, Choderlos de. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. 1782. Trans. P. W. K. Stone. 1961. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.


Denis Diderot (1713-1784)


5. Diderot, Denis. Oeuvres. Ed. André Billy. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 25. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.


6. Diderot, Denis. Pensées Philosophiques: Édition critique. 1746. Ed. Robert Niklaus. Textes Littéraires Français. Génève: Librairie Droz / Paris: Librairie Minard, 1957.


7. Diderot, Denis. Pensées philosophiques / Lettre sur les aveugles / Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. 1746, 1749, 1772. Ed. Antoine Adam. GF. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1972.


8. Diderot, Denis. Entretien entre D’Alembert et Diderot / Le Rêve de D’Alembert / Suite de l’entretien. 1769. Ed. Jacques Roger. 1965. GF. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1973.


9. Diderot, Denis. Le Neveu de Rameau et autres dialogues philosophiques. Ed. Jean Varloot. Notes by Nicole Évrard. Collection Folio, 171. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1972.


10. Diderot, Denis. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. 1796. Trans. Michael Henry. Introduction & Notes by Martin Hall. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.


11. Diderot, Denis. The Nun (La Religieuse). 1796. Trans. Marianne Sinclair. Introduction & Afterword by Richard Griffiths. New English Library Classics. London: The New English Library Ltd., 1966.


François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon [François Fénelon] (1651-1715)


12. Fénelon. Les Aventures de Télémaque. 1699. Les Meilleurs Auteurs Classiques: Français et Étrangers. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, Éditeur, 1925.


Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette [Madame de La Fayette] (1634-1693)


13. Lafayette, Madame de. La Princesse de Clèves. 1678. Ed. Émile Magne. Textes Littéraires Français. Génève: Librairie Droz / Lille: Librairie Giard, 1950.


14. Lafayette, Madame de. Romans et nouvelles: Textes revus sur les editions originales. Édition illustrée. Ed. Émile Magne. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1958.


Alain-René Lesage / Le Sage (1668-1747)


15. Le Sage, Alain-René. Le Diable Boiteux. 1707. Oeuvres de Le Sage. Avec une notice par Anatole France. 2 vols. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, Éditeur, 1878.


16. Le Sage, René. The Devil on Two Sticks. Trans. William Strange. 1841. Introduction by Arthur Symons. Illustrated by Philip Hagreen. London: The Navarre Society Limited, 1940.


17. Le Sage, Alain-René. Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane. 1715, 1724 & 1735. Ed. Roger Laufer. GF. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1977.


18. Le Sage, A. R. The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane. 1715, 1724 & 1735. Trans. B. H. Malkin. Collins’ Lotus Library. London & Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d.


19. Le Sage, René. Théâtre: Turcaret; Crispin Rival de son maître; La Tontine. Ed. Maurice Bardon. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garner Frères, 1948.


Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763)


20. Marivaux, Pierre. La Vie de Marianne, ou Les Aventures de Madame la Comtesse de ***. 1731-1742. Ed. Frédéric Deloffre. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garner Frères, 1963.


21. Marivaux, Pierre. Le Paysan Parvenu. 1734-35 & 1756. Ed. Michel Gilot. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1965.


22. Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de. Théâtre. Paris: Bibliothèque Hachette, n.d.


23. Marivaux, Pierre. Up from the Country / Infidelities / The Game of Love and Chance. Trans. Leonard Tancock & David Cohen. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.


Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791)


24. Mirabeau, Le Comte de. The Lifted Curtain & My Conversion. Trans. Howard Nelson. Introduction by J-P Spencer. A Star Book. W. H. Allen & Co. PLC, 1986.


Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles [Abbé Prévost] (1697-1763)


25. Prévost, Abbé. Manon Lescaut: Édition illustrée. 1731. Ed. Frédéric Deloffre & Raymond Picard. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1965.


26. Prévost, Abbé. Manon Lescaut. 1731. Préface de Pierre Mac Orlan. 1959. Le Livre de Poche, 460. Paris: Gallimard / Librarie Générale Française, 1968.


27. Prévost, Abbé. Manon Lescaut. 1731. Trans. L. W. Tancock. 1949. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951.


28. Prévost, Abbé. The History of the Chevalier des Grieux and of Manon Lescaut. 1731. Trans. Helen Waddell. Essay by Edward Sackville-West. Wood Engravings by Valentin Le Campion. London: the Folio Society, 1950.


Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814)


29. Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de. Paul et Virginie: Édition illustrée. 1787. Ed. Pierre Trahard. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1958.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


30. Romanciers du XVIIème siècle: Sorel – Scarron – Furetière – Madame de la Fayette. Ed. Antoine Adam. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 131. 1958. Paris: Gallimard, 1962.

Abbé Prévost: Manon Lescaut (1731 / 1753)

•


Henry Fielding: Shamela (1741)

The English Novel

Authors:

1. Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
2. Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
3. John Bunyan (1628-1688)
4. Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673)
5. John Cleland (1709-1789)
6. Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731)
7. Henry Fielding (1707–1754)
8. Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
9. Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831)
10. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)
11. Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1601)
12. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)
13. Tobias George Smollett (1721–1771)
14. Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
15. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
16. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

_____________________________________

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (1561-1626)


1. Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam. The New Atlantis. 1627. Ed. G. C. Moore Smith. Cambridge: University Press, 1900.


Aphra Behn (1640-1689)


2. Behn, Aphra. The Novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn [The Royal Slave and Other Novels]. Introduction by Ernest A. Baker. London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., n.d.


3. Behn, Aphra. Selected Writings of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn: Comprising the four novels: The Adventure of the Black Lady, The Court of the King of Bantam, The Unfortunate Happy Lady, & The Fair Jilt; a comedy in five acts: The Dutch Lover; and selected verse and translations. Introduction by Robert Phelps. An Evergreen Book. New York: Grove Press, 1950.


4. Behn, Aphra. The Ten Pleasures of Marriage; and The Second Part: The Confession of the New Married Couple. 1682-1683. Ed. John Harvey. London: The Navarre Society Limited, 1950


5. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave. A True History. 1688. Introduction by Lore Metzger. The Norton Library. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973.


6. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text; Historical Backgrounds; Criticism. 1688. Ed. Joanna Lipking. A Norton Critical Edition. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.


7. Behn, Aphra. Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. 1684-87. Introduction by Maureen Duffy. Virago Modern Classic, 240. London: Virago Press Limited, 1987.


8. Cameron, W. J. New Light on Aphra Behn: An investigation into the facts and fictions surrounding her journey co Surinam in 1663 and her activities as a spy in Flanders in 1666. University of Auckland Monograph, 5. Auckland: Wakefield Press Ltd., 1961.


9. Duffy, Maureen. The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.


10. Hahn, Emily. Aphra Behn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.


John Bunyan (1628-1688)


11. Bunyan, John. The Complete Works. Introduction by John P. Gulliver. Illustrated Edition. Philadelphia; Brantford, Ont.: Bradley, Garretson & Co. / Chicago, Ills.; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville, Tenn.; St. Louis, Mo.; San Francisco, Cal.: Wm. Garretson & Co., 1881.


12. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is To Come: Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream. London: The Religious Tract Society, n.d. [1877].


13. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 1965. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


14. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come. 1666, 1678, & 1684. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 1962 & 1960. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.


15. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding & The Life and Death of Mr Badman. 1666 & 1680. Introduction by G. B. Harrison. An Everyman Paperback. Everyman’s Library, 1815. 1928. London: J. M. Dent & Sons / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969.


16. Bunyan, John. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. 1680. Introduction by Bonamy Dobrée. The Worlds’ Classics, 338. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1929.


17. Bunyan, John. The Holy War Made by King Shaddai upon Diabolus To regain the Metropolis of the World or, The Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Mansoul. 1682. Ed. Wilbur M. Smith. The Wycliffe Series of Christian Classics. Chicago: Moody Press, 1948.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne [nee Lucas] (1623–1673)


18. Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. 1666. Ed. Kate Lilly. 1992. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.


John Cleland (1709-1789)


19. Cleland, John. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. 1749. Ed. Peter Sabor. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.


Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731)


20. Defoe, Daniel. The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe. 1927-28. Oxford: Basil Blackwell / Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press / London: William Clowes & Sons Limited, 1974.
    • The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. 1719. Vol. I.
    • The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. 1719. Vol. II.
    • The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Vol. III.
    • The Fortunate Mistress. 1724. Vol. I.
    • The Fortunate Mistress. 1724. Vol. II.
    • A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722.


21. Defoe, Daniel. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings. 1700. Ed. P. N. Furbank & W. R. Owens. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.


22. Defoe, Daniel. The Storm. 1704. Ed. Richard Hamblyn. London: Allen Lane, 2003.


23. Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Ed. Angus Ross. 1965. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.


24. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe / The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Introduction by Frederick Brereton. Collins Classics. London & Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1961.


25. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner; The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Introduction by Guy N. Pocock. 1945. Everyman’s Library, 1059. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1966.


26. Defoe, Daniel. The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton. 1720. Introduction by James Sutherland. 1963. Everyman’s Library, 1074. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1969.


27. Defoe, Daniel. Captain Singleton. 1720. Ed. Shiv K. Kumar. Oxford English Novels. Ed. James Kinsley. 1969. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.


28. Defoe, Daniel. Memoirs of a Cavalier. 1720. Introduction by G. A. Aitken. 1908. Everyman’s Library, 283. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1933.


29. Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as well Public as Private, which Happened in London during the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who Continued all the while in London. Never made Public Before. 1722. Ed. Anthony Burgess & Christopher Bristow. Introduction by Anthony Burgess. 1966. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


30. Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. Who Was Born in Newgate, and During a Life of Continued Variety for Threescore Years, Besides Her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, Five Times a Wife (Whereof Once to Her Own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at Last Grew Rich, Lived Honest & Died a Penitent, Written From Her Own Memorandums. 1722. Foreword by Oliver St. John Gogarty. Black & White Illustrations by Arthur Wragg. 1948. London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation Limited, 1950.


31. Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. 1722. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


32. Defoe, Daniel. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. 1724. Ed. Jane Jack. 1964. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.


33. Defoe, Daniel [as ‘Captain Charles Johnson’]. A General History of the Pyrates. 1724. Ed. Manuel Schonhorn. 1972. Dover Maritime Books. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999.


34. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. 1724-26. Ed. Pat Rogers. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


35. Hazlitt, William, ed. The Works of Daniel De Foe, with a Memoir of His Life and Writings. 2 vols. London: John Clements, 1840-41.


Henry Fielding (1707–1754)


36. Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Mr. Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams & An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. 1741 & 1742. Ed. Douglas Brooks. 1970. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.


37. Fielding, Henry. A Journey from This World to the Next. 1743. Introduction by Claude Rawson. Everyman’s Library, 1112. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1973.


38. Fielding, Henry. Jonathan Wild & The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. 1743 & 1755. Ed. Douglas Brooks. Introduction by A. R. Humphreys. 1932. Everyman’s Library, 1877. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1973.


39. Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones. 1749. Ed. R. P. C. Mutter. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.


40. Fielding, Henry. The History of Amelia. 1752. Illustrated by George Cruickshank. 2 vols. Classic Novels. London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d.


41. Fielding, Henry. The Works: Complete in One Volume, with Memoir of the Author, by Thomas Roscoe. London: Henry Washbourne et al., 1840.


Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)


42. Fielding, Sarah. The Adventures of David Simple, and The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last. 1744 & 1753. Ed. Linda Bree. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2002.


43. Fielding, Sarah. The Governess, or, Little Female Academy. 1749. Ed. Jill E. Grey. The Juvenile Library. Ed. Brian W. Alderson. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.


Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831)


44. Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. 1771. Ed. Brian Vickers. 1967. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.


Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)


45. More, Thomas. Utopia. 1516. Trans. Paul Turner. 1965. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1601)


46. Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. Ed. J. B. Steane. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)


47. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded. 1740-41. Introduction by M. Kinkead-Weekes. 1962. 2 vols. Everyman’s Library, 683-4. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1969.


48. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. 1747-48. Ed. Angus Ross. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.


49. Richardson, Samuel. The History of Clarissa Harlowe. 1747-48. Introduction by John Butt. 4 vols. Everyman’s Library, 882-5. 1932. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1962.


50. Richardson, Samuel. The History of Sir Charles Grandison. 1753-54. Ed. Jocelyn Harris. 3 vols. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.


Tobias George Smollett (1721–1771)


51. Smollett, Tobias. Roderick Random. 1748. Introduction by H. W. Hodges. Everyman’s Library, 790. 1927. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1964.


52. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, in which are included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality. 1751. Ed. James L. Clifford. 1964. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.


53. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. 1753. Ed. Damian Grant. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.


54. Smollett, Tobias. Travels through France and Italy. 1766. Introduction by Thomas Secombe. The World’s Classics, 90. 1907. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1919.


55. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves & The History and Adventures of an Atom. 1762 & 1769. London: The Waverley Book Company, Ltd., n.d.


56. Smollett, Tobias. The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. 1771. Ed. Angus Ross. 1967. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)


57. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1759-67. Ed. Graham Petrie. Introduction by Christopher Ricks. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.


58. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, to which are added The Journal to Eliza & A Political Romance. 1768. Ed. Ian Jack. 1968. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.


59. Sterne, Laurence. The Works: Comprising The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Sermons, Letters, &c., with A Life of the Author, Written by Himself. London: Henry G. Bohn., 1853.


60. Sterne, Laurence. Memoirs of Mr. Laurence Sterne; The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey; Selected Sermons and Letters. Ed. Douglas Grant. The Reynard Library. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950.


61. Traugott, John, ed. Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Clifs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.


Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)


62. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels and Selected Writings in Prose & Verse. Ed. John Hayward. The Compendious Series. London: The Nonesuch Press / New York: Random House, 1934.


63. Swift, Jonathan. The Annotated Gulliver's Travels: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. 1726 / 1734 / 1896. Ed. Isaac Asimov. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. / Publishers, 1980.


64. Swift, Jonathan. Journal to Stella. Ed. Harold Williams. 1948. 2 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.


65. Swift, Jonathan. The Poems. Ed. Harold Williams. 1937. Second ed. 1958. 3 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.


66. Swift, Jonathan. Poetical Works. Ed. Herbert Davis. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.


67. Swift, Jonathan. Satires and Personal Writings. Ed. William Alfred Eddy. 1932. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.


68. Nokes, David. Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed. A Critical Biography. 1985. Oxford Lives. London: Oxford University Press, 1987.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


69. Birkett, Sir Norman, ed. The Newgate Calendar: With Contemporary Engravings. 1951. London: The Folio Society, 1993.


70. Birkett, Lord, ed. The New Newgate Calendar. 1960. London: The Folio Society, 1993.


71. Henderson, Philip, ed. Shorter Novels. Volume 1: Elizabethan and Jacobean. Thomas Deloney: Jack of Newberie and Thomas of Reading; Robert Greene: The Carde of Fancie; Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller. 1597, 1600, 1587, & 1594. Introduction by George Saintsbury. 1929. Everyman’s Library, 824. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1943.


72. Henderson, Philip, ed. Shorter Novels. Volume 2: Jacobean and Restoration. Emmanuel Ford: Ornatus & Artesia; Aphra Behn: Oroonoko; Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines; William Congreve: Incognita. 1634, 1688, 1668, & 1713. Everyman’s Library, 841. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1930.


73. Kerby-Miller, Charles, ed. The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus. Written in Collaboration by the Members of the Scriblerus Club: John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell & Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. 1950. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966.


74. McBurney, W. H., ed. Four Before Richardson: Selected English Novels, 1720-1727. Luck at Last, or the Happy Unfortunate, by Arthur Blackamore; The Jamaica Lady, or the Life of Bavia, by W. P; Philidore and Placentia, or L’Amour trop Delicat, by Eliza Haywood; The Accomplished Rake, or Modern Fine Gentleman, by Mary Davys. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.


75. Painter, William. The Palace of Pleasure: Elizabethan Versions of Italian and French Novels from Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Straparola, Queen Margaret of Navarre, and Others. 1566-67, 1575. Ed. Joseph Jacobs. 1890. 3 vols. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966.


76. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.

Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1741)

•


Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2000)

My Theory of the Novel
in a Nutshell:

Scheherazade


1. Folktale roots: characterised by excessive patterning and repetition of motifs (as seen in the Eastern Framestory Tradition)




Transformations of Lucius


2. Confessional: the various forms of auto/biography (of which there are many different potential models in classical literature: Xenophon's Cyropaedia, Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Caesar & Augustus's third-person autobiographies, The Confessions of St. Augustine, to name just a few ...)




Tales of Ise


3. Poetry anthology: with commentaries on the individual poems becoming chapters (seen in the Japanese Tales of Ise - as well as Egil's Saga in Iceland)




Ovide Moralisé


4. Medieval romance: characterised by C. S. Lewis (in The Allegory of Love) as "Ovid misunderstood:" earnest, Christian mis-applications of Ovid's witty urban satirical epics, epistles and tales




Lándnámabók


5. Historiography: as it evolves into historical fiction (the shift from Ari's Lándnámabók and Íslendingabók to the first, anonymous Sagas of Icelanders




Wu Ch'eng-en: Journey to the West


6. Religious narratives: stories of saints and demons as a backdrop for the satirical fantasy (and realism) of the Chinese novel




Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (1749)


7. Fielding's (secular) "comic epic in prose": a kind of culmination of the Cervantine tradition of deliberately parody of absurd literary excess as a vehicle for (so-called) "realism"

The Children of Quixote

•

The True Story of the Novel (6): The Chinese Novel

Yao Yuxin: Hsiang-yun among the flowers (1978)
[from Cao Xueqin: Hung-lou Meng, chapter 63]

They went out to look, and sure enough found Hsiang-yun lying on a stone bench in a quiet spot behind an artificial mountain. She was sound asleep and covered with peony petals, which had floated over from all sides to scatter, red and fragrant, over her face and clothes. Her fan, dropped to the ground, was half-buried in fallen blossoms, too, while bees and butterflies were buzzing and flirting around her. And she had wrapped up some peony petals in her handkerchief to serve as a pillow. They all thought she looked both sweet and comical..."

– Tsao Hsueh-chin, A Dream of Red Mansions, trans. Yang Hsien Yi & Gladys Yang (1978): vol. II, p. 364.

Cao Xueqin

I've already had a fair amount to say on this subject at various times. My essay "In Love with the Chinese Novel: A Voyage around the Hung Lou Meng" appeared in brief 37 (2009): 10-28 (after being long-listed for the Landfall Essay Prize). I also put up a kind of bibliographical post with illustrations of classic Chinese novels here on the Imaginary Museum at roughly the same time.

If it does interest you, I recommend that you check out one or both of these pieces. There doesn't seem much point in repeating here what I've already written there. The topic is, however, a vast one, so I'm certainly not afraid of running out of things to talk about.

To summarise briefly, traditional Chinese critics have identified a canon of four - and only four - Great Classical Novels:

The Three Kingdoms: The Peach Garden Oath (1591)



1. Luo Guanzhong: Sānguó Yǎnyì [The Three Kingdoms] (c.1400)




The Water Margin: Lu Zhishen uproots a tree (19th century)



2. Shi Nai'an: Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn [The Water Margin] (late 14th century)




Journey to the West: The Four Pilgrims (Summer Palace, Beijing)



3. Wu Cheng'en: Xī Yóu Jì [Journey to the West] (1592)




Dream of the Red Chamber: The Crab-Flower Club (19th century)



4. Cao Xue Qin: Hóng Lóu Mèng [The Red Chamber Dream] (late 18th century)

Here are some of the principal English translations of each novel (all are fortunately now available in complete, scholarly versions):

Moss Roberts, trans.: The Three Kingdoms (1994)


The Three Kingdoms


1. Lo Kuan-Chung. San Kuo, or Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Trans. C. H. Brewitt-Taylor. 2 vols. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1925.


2. Luo Guanzhong. Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel. Trans. Moss Roberts. Foreword by John S. Service. 1994. 3 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press / Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.


3. Luo Guanzhong. Three Kingdoms. Trans. Moss Roberts. Foreword by John S. Service. 1994. 4 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2001.




John & Alex Dent-Young, trans.: The Marshes of Mount Liang (1994-2002)


The Water Margin


4. Buck, Pearl, trans. All Men are Brothers [Shui Hu Chuan]. 2 vols. New York: The John Day Company, 1933.


5. Shih Nai-an. Water Margin. Trans. J. H. Jackson. 2 vols. Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1963.


6. Weir, David. The Water Margin. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. [based on the BBC TV series]


7. Shi Nai’an & Luo Guanzhong. Outlaws of the Marsh. Trans. Sidney Shapiro. 3 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980.


8. Shi Nai’an & Luo Guanzhong. The Marshes of Mount Liang. Trans. John & Alex Dent-Young. 5 vols. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994-2002.
   
   • Vol. 1: The Broken Seals. 1994.
   • Vol. 2: The Tiger Killers. 1997.
   • Vol. 3: The Gathering Company. 2001.
   • Vol. 4: Iron Ox. 2002.
   • Vol. 5: The Scattered Flock. 2002.




Anthony C. Yu, trans.: The Journey to the West (1977-83)


Journey to the West


9. Wu Ch’êng-Ên. Monkey. Trans. Arthur Waley. 1942. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.


10. Low, C. C. & Associates, trans. Pictorial Stories of Chinese Classics: The Adventures of the Monkey God. 1975. 4 vols. Singapore: Canfonian Pte Ltd., 1989.


11. The Journey to the West. Trans. Anthony C. Yu. 4 vols. 1977-1983. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 1982, 1980, 1984.


12. Wu Cheng’en. Journey to the West. Trans. W. J. F. Jenner. 1982. 3 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1990.


13. Tung Yueh. Hsi-yu pu. Tower of Myriad Mirrors: A Supplement to Journey to the West. Trans. Shuen-fu Lin & Larry J. Schultz. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1978.


14. Pisu, Silverio. The Ape. Illustrated by Milo Manara. New York: Catalan Communications, 1986.


15. Monkey [“Saiyūki”]: Season One: Episodes 1-13. Japan: Nippon TV, 1978.


16. Monkey [“Saiyūki”]: Season One: Episodes 14-26. Japan: Nippon TV, 1978.


17. Monkey [“Saiyūki”]: Season Two: Episodes 27-39. Japan: Nippon TV, 1979.


18. Monkey [“Saiyūki”]: Season Two: Episodes 40-52. Japan: Nippon TV, 1980.




David Hawkes, trans.: The Story of the Stone (1978-86)


The Red Chamber Dream


19. Tsao Hsueh-Chin. Dream of the Red Chamber. Trans. Chi-chen Wang. 1929. Preface by Mark van Doren. London: Vision Press, 1959.


20. Kuhn, Franz, ed. Hung Lou Meng: The Dream of the Red Chamber – A Chinese Novel of the Early Ching Period. Trans. Isabel and Florence McHugh. 1958. The Universal Library. New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1968.


21. Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes. Trans. David Hawkes. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973-80.
    • Vol. 1: The Golden Days. 1973.
    • Vol. 2: The Crab-Flower Club. 1977.
    • Vol. 3: The Warning Voice. 1980.


22. Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone (Also Known as The Dream of the Red Chamber): A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes, edited by Gao E. Trans. John Minford. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982-86.
    • Vol. 4: The Debt of Tears. 1982.
    • Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes. 1986.


23. Tsao Hsueh-Chin & Kao Ngo. A Dream of Red Mansions. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 3 vols. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978.


24. Wu Shih-Ch’Ang. On The Red Chamber Dream: A Critical Study of Two Annotated Manuscripts of the XVIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.

I suppose the first thing to say about these novels is that all they're very long; often available in a variety of versions, sometimes with different numbers of chapters; and that each of these chapters is carefully constructed, and generally introduced by a poetic couplet summarizing its contents.

Abridged or "adapted" versions can give you some of the flavour of the originals, but unfortunately they're bound by their very nature to miss out certain of the vital characteristics of these very particular masterpieces of the novelist's art: above all, the immense scope and inclusiveness of all four of these works.

Though they clearly build upon one another, each of the four has an atmosphere and style all its own:

• The Three Kingdoms is a kind of Chinese Iliad, an immense chronicle of war and intrigue spanning decades and vast terrains: a profoundly serious meditation on war and peace and statecraft.


• The Water Margin is equally complex, but far more popular and vernacular in tone. It chronicles the adventures of a group of Robin Hood-like outlaws, and is episodic in structure: serious and humorous by turns.


• The Journey to the West continues this emphasis on popular culture: in this case myths and folktales, but combines them with a wise, witty, and deeply disenchanted vision of the doings of all the creatures in Earth and Heaven. Wu Cheng’en's novel is, essentially, a satire on conventional religion, but one can't help feeling that the author remains agnostic about the true nature of the universe lying behind this absurd veil of appearances ...


• The Red Chamber Dream, finally, is a family chronicle - deeply autobiographical, we are assured, but transformed into a tapestry of poetry, philosophy and eroticism which rivals in intensity anything in Proust or Lady Murasaki. It's probably the most immediately approachable of these great novels, though the frustratingly fragmentary nature of the text means that only the first two thirds of the story seems to reflect accurately its author's original artistic intentions.

What else can one say? There they are. Read them. They're certainly as essential to any true understanding of the possibilities of the novel form as Tolstoy or Flaubert (not to mention Kafka or Joyce).

Once you have read them, though, a number of questions will no doubt arise for you. Why did only these four make the cut? What are all the other Classical Chinese novels like? Are they so inferior to these ones? How reliable is this particular piece of canon-making? Is there really a complete critical concensus about it?

Well, luckily the profusion of new translations of these and other Chinese novels in the second half of the twentieth century was accompanied with some marvellous works of literary analysis and commentary. The place to start remains C. T. Hsia's venerable The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction (1968), a work which is unlikely to be superseded anytime soon (despite certain blindspots in his judgements of the individual novels).

Hsia enlarged the canon of "classic novels" to six, including the vast and sexually explicit Jīn Píng Méi [The Golden Lotus] (1618), as well as Wu Jingzi's satire on Confucian bureaucracy Rúlínwàishǐ [The Scholars] (1750). Both are now available in reliable contemporary English translations, luckily (though David Tod Roy's magisterial five-volume version of the Chin P’ing Mei was only completed this year - a couple of months ago, in fact):

The Golden Lotus: Hsi-men Ching with Golden Lotus (Ming dynasty)


The Golden Lotus


1. Egerton, Clement, trans. The Golden Lotus: A Translation, from the Chinese Original, of the Novel Chin P’ing Mei. 1939. 4 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.


2. 'Lanling Xiiaoxiaosheng'. The Golden Lotus: Jin Ping Mei. Trans. Clement Egerton & Shu Qingchun (Lao She). 1939. Rev. ed. 1972. Introduction by Robert Hegel. 2 vols. Tokyo / Rutland, Vermont / Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 2011.


3. Kuhn, Franz, ed. Chin P’ing Mei: The Adventurous History of Hsi Men and his Six Wives. Trans. Bernard Miall. Introduction by Arthur Waley. 1939. London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1952.


4. Kuhn, Franz, ed. Ko Lien Hua Ying: Flower Shadows behind the Curtain: A Sequel to Chin P’ing Mei. Trans. Vladimir Kean. London: The Bodley Head, 1959.


5. Jin Ping Mei: Fleur en Fiole d’Or. 2 vols. Trans. André Lévy. 1985. Collection Folio 3997-8. Paris: Gallimard, 2004.


6. Magnus. Les 110 pillules, d’après Jin Ping Mei. Trans. Luca Staletti. 1986. Paris: l’Echo des Savanes / Albin Michel, 1991.


7. Roy, David Tod, trans. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei. 5 vols. Princeton Library of Asian Translations. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1993-2013.
   • Vol. 1: The Gathering. 1993.
   • Vol. 2: The Rivals. 2001.
   • Vol. 3: The Aphrodisiac. 2006.
   • Vol. 4: The Climax. 2011.
   • Vol. 5: The Dissolution. 2013.




Wu Jingzi (1701-1754)


The Scholars


8. Wu Ching-Tzu. The Scholars. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 1957. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973.

These suggested additions to the list have probably attracted almost as many English-language readers as the other four, given the immense popularity of Hsia's book. And, indeed, the first of them is unquestionably a masterpiece: one of the great novels of world literature. As for the second, its disjointed structure and the very targetted nature of its satire make it a little difficult for a non-Chinese speaking reader to judge. It's certainly not lacking in appeal, though:

David Tod Roy, trans.: The Plum in the Golden Vase (1993-2013)



• The Plum in the Golden Vase is probably the most erotically explicit of all great world novels. Its most recent translator, David Tod Roy, argues persuasively that this is part of the author's complex plan to show the necessary consequences of official corruption in his own day - for Hsi-Men Ching, the protagonist, read the Emperor, and so on down the chain. There's certainly little of the hedonistic romp about it - though some of the earlier, more selective translations did try to stress some of the more playful aspects of the action, trying to imply that this framework of morality was simply a kind of necessary smoke-screen. At least we're finally in a position to consider this question in detail, thanks to Roy's immense and painstaking work of translation and commentary ...




Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang, trans.: The Scholars (1957)



• The Scholars is the least immediately impressive of these classic Chinese novels, but it's certainly readable enough, and one can see a kind of Balzacian intelligence behind it, alert to the untapped possibilities of the novel form for social and intellectual commentary.

It's probably too early to judge whether English-speaking readers are now in a position to appreciate properly the range and scope of the traditional Chinese novel. Certainly Lu Hsun's Brief History of Chinese Fiction (1923-24) lists large numbers of works which are still completely unavailable in translation. Of those that are extant, The 16th-century Creation of the Gods has little beyond the excitement of incident to add to the technical innovations of the "big five" (the four + Chin P'ing Mei). Li Yu's Carnal Prayer Mat is far more witty and entertaining, like a kind of Chinese Fanny Hill, but probably not in itself a "great work" (whatever that means).

The one that really sounds interesting is Li Ju-Chen's Flowers in the Mirror (1828), unfortunately still available only in an abridged and (we're told) inadequate English translation. It is - apparently - a kind of Chinese Alice in Wonderland, with certain aspects of the Pilgrim's Progress mixed in. But since a large part of its appeal comes from the learned game-playing of its author's prose-style, it seems quite likely that it will remain untranslatable for the foreseeable future.

I've compiled a list here of some other striking works of Chinese fiction, short and long. I wish I myself owned more of the excellent critical works which have come out on the subject since C. T. Hsia's, but they tend to be very expensive to buy, and to go out of print pretty quickly: the major ones appear to be Andrew H. Plaks' Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (1987), David L. Rolston's Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines (1997), as well as the same author's earlier collection of edited essays How to Read the Chinese Novel (1990). The only other considerable work on the subject I have a copy of is Robert E. Hegel's excellent (though very specific) The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China (1981).

Jin Ping Mei

Miscellaneous Chinese fiction:

1. Creation of the Gods [Fêng-shên yen-i] – 16th century
2. The Carnal Prayer Mat [Jou Pu Tuan] – 1657
3. Flowers in the Mirror [Ching hua yuan] – 1828
4. Feng Menglong (1574-1645)
5. Lu Xun (1881-1936)
6. Pu Songling (1640-1715)
7. Robert van Gulik (1910-1967)
8. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

---

Creation of the Gods [Fêng-shên yen-i] – 16th century


1. Low, C. C. & Associates, trans. Pictorial Stories of Chinese Classics: Canonization of Deities. 3 vols. Singapore: Canfonian Pte Ltd., 1989.


2. Gu Zhizhong, trans. Creation of the Gods. 2 vols. 1992. Beijing: New World Press, 1996.


The Carnal Prayer Mat [Jou Pu Tuan] – 1657


3. Li Yu. Jou Pu Tuan: The Before Midnight Scholar, or The Prayer-mat of Flesh. Ed. Franz Kuhn. 1959. Trans. Richard Martin. 1963. London: Corgi Books, 1974.


4. Li Yu. The Carnal Prayer Mat. Wordsworth Erotic Classics: Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995.


5. Li Yu. The Carnal Prayer Mat. Trans. Patrick Hanan. 1990. Honolulu: University of Hawaí’i Press, 1996.


6. Li Yu. A Tower for the Summer Heat. Trans. Patrick Hanan. 1992. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.


Flowers in the Mirror [Ching hua yuan] – 1828


7. Li Ju-Chen. Flowers in the Mirror. Trans. Lin Tai-Yi. London: Peter Owen, 1965.


8. Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang, trans. Excerpts from Three Classical Chinese Novels: The Three Kingdoms, Pilgrimage to the West & Flowers in the Mirror. Beijing: Panda Books, 1981.


Feng Menglong (1574-1645)


9. Feng Menglong. Stories Old and New: A Ming Dynasty Collection. 1620. Trans. Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. Seattle & London: Washington University Press, 2000.


Zhou Shuren ['Lu Xun' / 'Lu Hsun'] (1881-1936)


10. Lu Hsun. Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 1960. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978.


11. Lu Hsun. Old Tales Retold. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 1961. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972.


12. Lu Hsun. Wild Grass. 1974. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1980.


13. Lu Hsun. Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976.


14. Lu Xun. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. Trans. William A. Lyell. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.


15. Lu Xun. The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. Trans. Julia Lovell. Afterword by Yiyun Li. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2009.


16. Lu Hsun. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. 1923-24. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 1959. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1982.


Pu Songling / P'u Sung-ling (1640-1715)


17. P’u Sung-ling. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Trans. Herbert A. Giles. 1916. Honolulu, Hawai’i: University Press of the Pacific, 2003.


18. Pu Songling. Strange Tales of Liaozhai. Trans. Lu Yunzhong, Yang Liyi, Yang Zhihong, & Chen Tifang. Illustrated by Tao Xuehua. Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, Ltd., 1982.


19. Pu Songling. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Trans. John Minford. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006.


Robert Hans van Gulik (1910-1967)


20. Van Gulik, Robert, trans. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. 1949. New York: Dover, 1976.


21. Van Gulik, Robert. The Haunted Monastery & The Chinese Maze Murders: Two Chinese Detective Novels. 1961 & 1957. New York: Dover, 1977.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


22. Hegel, Robert E. The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.


23. Hsia, C. T. The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction. 1968. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.


24. Lévy, André, trans. Le Sublime Discours de la fille candide : Manuel d’érotologie chinoise. 2000. Picquier Poche 224. Paris: Philippe Picquier, 2004.


25. Ma, Y. W. & Joseph M. Lau, eds. Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.


Korean:


26. Kim Man-Choong. The Cloud Dream of the Nine: A Korean Novel – A Story of the Times of the Tangs of China about 840 A.D. Trans. James S. Gale. London: Daniel O’Connor, 1922.


Tibetan:


27. Tshe ring dbang rgyal. The Tale of the Incomparable Prince. 1727. Trans. Beth Newman. The Library of Tibet. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997.

The last two listed there, from (respectively) ancient Korea and Tibet develop a number of themes from such Buddhist-inspired works as The Journey to the West, but with some additional flavour from their own indigenous traditions.

I should also explain the (apparent) anomaly of listing the sinologist Robert van Gulik among the other authors above. Van GHulik first published a translation of a "genuine eighteenth-century" Chinese detective novel, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, in 1949. He proceeded to follow this up with his own original series of crime novels starring the same character, which proved quite popular. It's certainly an unusual (possibly unique) example of direct influence between the Chinese and Western fictional traditions, even though the results read (to me, at any rate) a little on the wooden side.

I guess I began this post with a quote from the Hung Lou Meng to try and give you something of the half-realistic, half-idealised atmosphere of that particular novel. I'll close, instead, with a famous scene from The Three Kingdoms where the warlord Cao Cao reveals his true nature:

Statue of Cao Cao

During his stay in Lü Boshe's house, Cao Cao overheard the sharpening of knives and a conversation among Lü's servants about whether to "kill or to tie up first", and he suspected that Lü was pretending to be hospitable towards him while actually plotting to harm him. He and Chen Gong dashed out and indiscriminately killed everyone in Lü Boshe's household. Later, they discovered that the servants were actually talking about slaughtering a pig for the feast and that they had killed innocent people. It was too late for regrets, so Cao Cao and Chen Gong immediately packed their belongings and left the house. Along the way, they met Lü Boshe, who was returning from his errand. When Lü Boshe asked them to stay with him, Cao Cao asked, "Who's that behind you?" When Lü Boshe turned around, Cao Cao stabbed him from behind and killed him. Chen Gong was shocked and he questioned Cao Cao, "Just now, you made a genuine mistake when you killed those people. But what about now?" Cao Cao replied, "If Lü Boshe goes home and sees his family members all dead, do you think he'll let us off? If he brings soldiers to pursue us, we'll be in deep trouble." Chen Gong said, "It's a grave sin to kill someone with the intention of doing so." Cao Cao remarked, "I'd rather do wrong to the world than allow the world to do wrong to me." Chen Gong did not respond and he left Cao Cao that night.

That final comment of Cao Cao's:

寧我負人，毋人負我！
nìng wǒ fù rén, wú rén fù wǒ!
"I'd rather do wrong to others than allow them to do wrong to me!"

has become proverbial. In Luo Guanzhong's novel, however, the original wording, used by the historical Cao Cao in 189 CE, has been subtly altered to read:

寧教我負天下人，休教天下人負我
"I'd rather do wrong to the world than allow the world to do wrong to me."

Statue of Luo Guanzhong

Chinese critic Yi Zhongtian claims, in a 2006 essay on the Three Kingdoms, that Luo "deliberately changed the words in the quote to reflect that Cao Cao had no sense of remorse because 'world' [lit. "people under Heaven"] carries greater weight than 'others' [lit. "people"], so as to enhance Cao's image as a villain in his novel."

Whether that's true or not, it gives us a vivid sense of the delicate balance between historical truth and fictional interpretation Lou tries to maintain throughout this most revered of the classical Chinese novels.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms