This paper considers the satiric mode in the xiaoshuo, a multigeneric category, as well as performance literature such as drama. I argue that satire commonly appears in xiaoshuo, although it may not seem obvious from the types of writings traditionally assigned to the category. In comparison with classical poetry and prose, xiaoshuo and drama frequently feature witty repartee and ludicrous jokes. Within the category of xiaoshuo, chuandi tales tend to contain more subtle satire. Farces and jokebooks include simple, straightforward satire that highlights various inconsistencies in human behavior and life in general. In comparison, some forms of oral literature and performance, such as jesting, stress the witty and ludicrous types of satire even more. In these genres, the satiric mode helps to criticize shortcomings in society or express dissatisfaction about the times, thereby serving as a sort of safety valve that alleviates social tensions somewhat.

In reading Feng Menglong’s adaptation of the Tale of the White Serpent, one often feels moral ambivalence in the narrative stance of the tale: a misogynist tendency mixed with sympathy for women. Tracing various versions of the tale prior to Feng Menglong’s adaptation, this paper tries first to see the changes in Feng’s version, and then to place his changes in the context of Chinese literary tradition in its representation of women. The analysis shows that Feng mainly inherited the traditional portrayal of women as a source of evil. However, the intellectual trend for an expression of individual feelings and Feng Menglong’s own dealings with women aroused his own sympathy for women at the same time. The moral ambivalence revealed in the tale is precisely Feng’s wavering between the two attitudes. In light of this moral ambivalence, the paper further examines issues concerning the construction of gender and a kind of dual attitude towards women in the late Ming period, which helps us better understand the way female images were represented and the way misogyny was perpetuated in premodern Chinese society.

Music and poetry have always been sisters, and classical literati so regarded them. But recent thinking has somehow divorced the two, so we now rarely listen to poetry with musical ears. When James J.Y. Liu conceived the interplay of a poem’s sounds and senses, images and forms as “polyphonic,” he got attacked on the grounds that poetic polyphony “is a pretty metaphor but fairly useless.” This article aims to redress such unnatural divorce and to demonstrate that notions of polyphony, in particular, can provide fruitful and, indeed, uniquely rewarding interpretations of old Chinese poetry. “Fugue and Flight” employs a surprising interpretive analogy that likens the interplay of complex meanings and different voices within a distinctive set of poems to the chase of themes within a fugue. Its examinations of these “evasive words” discovers fresh and compelling ways to read several verses from the Book of Songs, early ballads, and classics from Six Dynasties poetry. It thereby seeks to rejoin Chinese verse with the concerns of comparative literature and with a universe of aesthetic discourse from which it has remained all too often excluded.

Popular Beijing writer Wang Shuo became especially wellknown in 1988 when four of his novellas were adapted by film studios in China. As the most frequently cited example of Chinese Post Modernism, Wang Shuo's writing reworks both serious and light literature and makes no attempt to cover the artificiality of his own work. However, rather than challenging Chinese authority in his writing, he chooses instead to provide momentary comic relief to his audiences, which ultimately reinforces ideological authority. Rather than being a post-modernist in the sense of resistance or challenge to an assumed reality, Wang Shuos work is much closer in spirit to Matei Calinescu’s definition of kitsch.

This article analyzes the recent reprints of the English translations of Chinese novelist Eileen Chang's two major works, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) and The Rouge of the North (1967). When examined without the distortions of politics, these two novels reveal themselves to be major works of TwentiethCentury literature. Disappointingly, as this article points out, the editors of this reprinted edition have failed to properly emend a number of outstanding errors that were present in the original translation, thereby denying these texts the fluidity and subtlety that they deserve in their English versions.

in this interview conducted by Professor Yiu-nam Leung (National Tsing Hua University), Professor Steven Tötösy (University of Alberta) discusses briefly the systemic and empirical approach to literature and culture as well as the situation and possible future of this approach on the international scene of scholarship. Further, he introduces a new online journal, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/clewebjournal/ and talks about the situation of comparative literature at the University of Alberta. He concludes with a brief description of his plans for the near future.