Description
Winner of the Adele Mellen Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship The present research is the first attempt ever made at a systematic analysis of classical Chinese supernatural fiction known as zhiguai under the morphological framework designed by Vladimir Propp (1928) and later developed by Alan Dundes (1964). Zhiguai has long been a focus of Chinese studies, but the studies have been generally confined either to exploration into the geographical-historical sources of zhiguai tales or to the recognition and reconstruction of society in ancient China through zhiguai literature. A systematic study of this genre from a structural-functional perspective will shed light on the rules governing the textual organisation of classical Chinese fiction of the supernatural and strange. While the focus of this work is on a synchronic presentation of textual features and structural patterns of zhiguai fiction, a general review of zhiguai literature is conducted before a morphological analysis is made of this genre. The main purpose for this diachronic exploration is to complement the synchronic analysis of tale texts so as to present a panoramic view of classical Chinese fiction of the supernatural and strange.
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