Slapping the Table in Amazement. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Slapping the Table in Amazement

Slapping the Table in Amazement is the unabridged English translation of the famous story collection Pai’an jingqi by Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), originally published in 1628. The forty lively stories gathered here present a broad picture of traditional Chinese society and include characters from all social levels. We learn of their joys and sorrows, their views about life and death, and their visions of the underworld and the supernatural. Ling was a connoisseur of popular literature and a seminal figure in the development of Chinese literature in the vernacular, which paved the way for the late-imperial Chinese novel. Slapping the Table in Amazement includes translations of verse and prologue stories as well as marginal and interlinear comments.

The Chinese writer Ling Mengchu (1580-1644) came from a family of publishers who were pioneers in multicolor printing. While serving as assistant prefect of Xuzhou, near Nanjing, he was killed in a battle with Li Zicheng, who overthrew the Ming dynasty. Ling is best known for his vernacular short stories.

Shuhui Yang is professor of Chinese at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. He is cotranslator of the renowned 3-volume set of vernacular Ming stories by Feng Menglong (1574-1646) known as the Sanyan: Stories Old and New, Stories to Caution the World, and Stories to Awaken the World (University of Washington Press, 2000-2009).

Yunqin Yang is a simultaneous interpreter in the United Nations Secretariat. She is cotranslator of the renowned 3-volume set of vernacular Ming stories by Feng Menglong (1574-1646) known as the Sanyan: Stories Old and New, Stories to Caution the World, and Stories to Awaken the World (University of Washington Press, 2000-2009).

Robert E. Hegel is Liselotte Dieckmann Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Professor of Chinese at Washington University. He is the author of The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 1981); translator of True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China: Twenty Case Histories (University of Washington Press, 2009); and editor of Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Story Collection by Aina the Layman (University of Washington Press, 2017).