East Asian Studies: Chinese Literature

The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English & Chinese Dictionary provides parallel English and Chinese word-lists containing 28,000 items for each language. Based on the premise that pictures can more clearly convey certain kinds of information, the dictionary presents a list of vocabulary relating to a subject together with a picture illustrating that subject. Each double-page spread links the words by number to the picture situation drawn from everyday life. Approximately 384 sections cover a broad range of subjects in the fields of science, medicine, technology, industry, commerce, the arts, and leisure, including astronomy, automobiles, swimming, supermarkets, nuclear energy, and much more.

This volume of more than 20,000 terms is intended as an aid to the reading of newspapers, periodicals, and other materials published in the People's Republic. It assumes that the user will already have acquired a foundation in "traditional" Chinese; it is not, therefore, a complete dictionary. Instead, by concentrating on new terms and expressions not easily found translated or explained elsewhere, it should be a valuable supplement to the older, standard Chinese-English dictionaries.

"A vertitable feast of concise, useful, reliable, and up-to-dateinformation (all prepared by top scholars in the field), Nienhauser's now two-volumetitle stands alone as THE standard reference work for the study of traditionalChinese literature. Nothing like it has ever been published." --Choice The second volume to The Indiana Companion to TraditionalChinese Literature is both a supplement and an update to the original volume. VolumeII includes over 60 new entries on famous writers, works, and genres of traditionalChinese literature, followed by an extensive bibliographic update (1985-1997) ofeditions, translations, and studies (primarily in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and German) for the 500+ entries of Volume I.

Selected for Choice's list of Outstanding Academic Books for 1997. A comprehensive overview of China's 3,000 years of literary history, from its beginnings to the present day. After an introductory section discussing the concept of literature and other features of traditional Chinese society crucial to understanding its writings, the second part is broken into five major time periods (earliest times to 100 c.e.; 100-1000; 1000-1875; 1875-1915; and 1915 to the present) corresponding to changes in book production. The development of the major literary genres is traced in each of these periods. The reference section in the cloth edition includes an annotated bibliography of more than 120 pages; the paper edition has a shorter bibliography and is intended for classroom use.