The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature)

Rating:
Summary: Highly informative & useful, but no coverage of philosophy.
Review: THE INDIANA COMPANION TO TRADITIONAL CHINESE LITERATURE. Second Revised Edition. Edited by William H. Nienhauser, Charles O. Hartman, Y. W. Ma, and Stephen H. West. 1050 pp. Indiana Univ Press, 1985. ISBN: 0253329833 (hbk.)

This is a monumental reference work on the pre-1911 literature of China and was over seven years in preparation. It involved the work of almost two hundred international contributors and provides the basic background, analysis, and bibliography needed by both scholars and students to find their way around the huge corpus of Chinese literature, poetry, drama, and related commentary and scholarship.

Unfortunately 'literature' has been interpreted in the restricted sense of 'imaginative literature' (i.e., fiction, drama, poetry) and although some mention of China's philosophic literature was unavoidable, no entries exist for the major philosophers or philosophic texts. This, to some, may considerably reduce the value of the book. Major features of the book include :

Analytic survey essays of about 10,000 words each on Buddhist Literature, drama, fiction, literary criticism, poetry, prose, popular literature, rhetoric, Taoist (religious, not philosophic) literature, and women's literature.

Over 500 entries of approximately 1500 words each on famous writers, works, genres, styles, groups, movements, etc.

Each entry has a bilingual bibliography that lists editions, translations, and studies, and the major primary and secondary sources in Chinese, Japanese, English, French, and German.

Separate indexes of subjects, names, and titles.

Chinese names and titles have also been given in Chinese ideograms (sinographs) along with Wade-Giles transcriptions throughout. But one irritating defect of the book is that the pages lack headwords in the upper margins and finding a particular entry can involve a lot of riffling back and forth.

The book is a large heavy volume of full quarto size, well-printed in double columns on over one thousand pages of strong paper, stitched, and bound in full cloth for durability.

All in all it is an extremely interesting and useful 'Companion to Traditional Chinese _Imaginative_ Literature.' But what a pity the editors chose to exclude what for most people is the most interesting and significant Chinese literature of all, the philosophic literature of Ancient China.