translates to "Liaozhai Ghost Hunting"

Author: Wang Yijia
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: The author takes Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio as the subject and engages in the work of "searching for ghosts," primarily based on two fundamental beliefs. First, I believe that many Ming and Qing dynasty anecdotal novels, including Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, are essentially rebellions and compensations by Chinese intellectuals against Confucian thought. Second, I believe that Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, though highly literary, was not written to participate in literary competitions among scholars but to "record strange phenomena." Pu Songling himself made it clear: "I have a deep love for searching for spirits and enjoy hearing people talk about ghosts. Whenever I hear such tales, I take up my pen and thus complete the chapters." These two fundamental beliefs influenced my motivation for "searching for ghosts" and determined the direction of my research. The Ming and Qing dynasty anecdotal novels, filled with "supernatural and chaotic elements," can be said to be a grand collection of the "dark souls" of the Chinese lower classes over five hundred years. They naturally became ideal materials for me to understand the minds of the Chinese people during that era, because the medicine I studied taught me that approaching problems from the "abnormal" and "dark" aspects is an effective way to "understand the issue." The method I used is to deconstruct Strange Tales of the Marquis Pu as a "literary work" using "scientific knowledge" such as biology and psychology, observing the "past" from the "present" and analyzing the "local" through the "foreign," in an attempt to find something meaningful between the "scientific truth" and "literary imagination."