Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic

Download or read book Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic written by and published by . This book was released on 1985-12-22 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chinese literary history, the Six Dynasties (317-588) and the T'ang (618-906) were the great creative times for the production of supernatural and fantastic stories in the classical language. This major collection of ninety-six stories, most of them newly translated, represents the very best of this tradition. These are all basically fictional narratives or stories, but unlike Western supernatural stories, are considered more or less as records of observable facts and have the effect of giving the fantastic a rootedness in historical reality. Underlying the recording of these supernatual stories is a belief in supernaturalism and magic and, above all, the acceptance of the unnatural and the supernormal on their face value as factual.