Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library)

BOOK: Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library)
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The Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

 

African Folktales
by Roger D. Abrahams

African American Folktales
by Roger D. Abrahams

American Indian Myths and Legends
by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz

Arab Folktales
by Inea Bushnaq

Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies
by Moss Roberts

The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales
by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Favorite Folktales from Around the World
by Jane Yolen

Folktales from India
by A.K. Ramanujan

French Folktales
by Henri Pourrat

Gods and Heroes
by Gustav Schwab

Irish Folktales
by Henry Glassie

Japanese Tales
by Royall Tyler

Legends and Tales of the American West
by Richard Erdoes

The Norse Myths
by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Northern Tales
by Howard Norman

Norwegian Folk Tales
by Peter Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe

Russian Fairy Tales
by Aleksandr Afanas’ev

Swedish Folktales and Legends
by Lone Thygesen Blecher and George Blecher

The Victorian Fairy Tale Book
by Michael Patrick Hearn

Copyright © 1979 by Moss Roberts

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title:

Chinese fairy tales and fantasies.

1. Fantastic fiction, Chinese—Translations into English.
2. Fantastic fiction, English—Translations from Chinese.
3. Fairy tales, Chinese—Translations into English.
4. Fairy tales, English—Translations from Chinese. I. Roberts, Moss, 1937-
PL2658.E8C48   895.1′3′008   79-1894
eISBN: 978-0-307-76042-5

v3.1

 

For Sean and Jennifer

 

Contents

 
 
 
 

Acknowledgments

 

I would like to thank first of all Professor C. N. Tay of New York University for his sustaining encouragement and for sharing his extraordinary knowledge of language and literature;

the Pantheon editor, Wendy Wolf, and the copy editor, Mary Barnett, whose excellent judgment in matters of literary taste and English style improved my manuscript in countless ways;

my wife, Florence, and my children, Sean and Jennifer, who read the manuscript with care and made many valuable suggestions;

our friend, Shirley Hochhausen, who listened to these tales with a keen and appreciative ear;

the students in the East Asian Studies Program at New York University, who have stimulated so much of my research into Chinese literature.

A Note on the Illustrations

 

The illustrations were taken from the Ming encyclopedia
San Ts’ai T’u Huei
, or
Compendium of Illustrations for the Three Orders of Heaven, Earth, and Man
(1608). I am grateful to Mr. Jack Jacoby of the East Asian Collections of the Columbia University Libraries for permission to use their reprint edition. I also wish to thank Mr. David Tsai, Curator, and Ms. Alice Chi of the Gest Oriental Library of Princeton University for their assistance.

Introduction

 

The tales, fables, and fantasies in this collection blend the everyday life of mortals, the fabulous kingdom of birds and beasts, and the supernatural world of gods and ghosts. Like Western folk and fairy tales, they spring from the deep wells of a civilization’s history and imagination, and their cast of peasants, philosophers, virgins, kings, judges, tigers, and parrots may sometimes remind us of characters in more familiar legends. At the same time, these stories bear the stamp of the society and traditions that originally produced them. They illuminate the Chinese social order through the structured relationships that defined it: emperor and subject, father and son, husband and wife (or wives), official and peasant, human and beast.

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