Introduction

Much of Chinese literature is a historian’s delight. Precise dating, an obsession of elite Chinese culture from the beginning, has made the chronological account one of the most popular forms of historical writing. This passion, shared by Confucian literati and Buddhist monks alike, has given us an abundance of historical information in the form of titles, prefaces, and colophons on dates of composition and publication. The voluminous body of historiographical sources also aids in the dating of elite authors and their activities, which allows for a presentation of Chinese literature by period, such as is found in these volumes. This approach, however, runs the danger of failing to do justice to those works that defy attempts at precise dating. As long as such works belong to genres regarded as important, they and their authors (if known) will, with a few ritual caveats, be inserted into the chronological narrative, often at a date somewhat earlier than careful scholarship can justify. Works belonging to genres that fail to achieve canonical status, however, will be allowed to remain in the limbo of timeless oblivion. Such has been the fate of the vast corpus of prosimetric and verse narrative in many genres, including heroic stories, romantic tales, pious legends, and scandalous court cases, works that were written in roughly the last two imperial dynasties, but often were not published in print until the early twentieth century. The overwhelming majority of these texts are not attributed to an author; even in the rare cases where they are, it is often difficult to pinpoint the place and time of composition or first printing. A chapter treating these materials therefore must largely abandon a chronological presentation in favor of a generic and thematic one.