The Peach Blossom Fan

by K'ung Shang-jen

Overview

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520322318
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/10/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

K'ung Shang-jen (1646–1718) was a sixty-fourth generation descendant of Confucius and was raised in his ancestor’s hometown of Qufu in Shandong province. A noted expert in music and Confucian rites, he was chosen in 1684 to lecture to the visiting emperor Kangxi, who later appointed him to the Imperial Academy in Beijing. The Peach Blossom Fan was completed in 1699 and was performed to great acclaim in 1700. It was not published, however, until 1708, a few years after K’ung had left his post and returned home to Qufu.

Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature.

Chen Shih-Hsiang (1912–1971) was a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his books are The Genesis of Poetic Time and, with Harold Acton, Modern Chinese Poetry.

Harold Acton (1904–1994) was a prolific Anglo-Italian writer, poet, novelist, and translator. He lived in China from 1932 to ’39, teaching English literature at the University of Peking.

Cyril Birch is a translator and the Agassiz Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

Editorial Reviews

The Peach Blossom Fan is replete with romance, conflicts between loyalty and treachery, a healthy measure of bawdy humor, punning, elegant poetry, moral issues, and popular philosophical currents....This is a lively, readable, and faithful translation of a major work of Chinese literature.” —Howard Goldblatt
 
“Many popular Chinese plays fail to qualify as literature, being no more than plain scripts for brilliant actors to display their virtuosity. The Peach Blossom Fan appears to be a luminous exception, for it is a highly poetic chronicle play composed by a distinguished scholar, K’ung Shang-jen, who was born soon after the events he portrayed. As a vivid evocation of the downfall of the Ming dynasty, it deserves to be better known to students of Chinese literature and history.” —Harold Acton

From the Publisher