![]() At the University of California Press, executive editor Sheila Levine, senior editor Amy Klatzkin, and editor Laura Driussi have my gratitude for patiently guiding this book through the stages of publication, as does Anne Canright for her careful editing. I hope I will be forgiven for collectively thanking the many colleagues, librarians, curators, and graduate assistants who were generous with their time and advice. The Center for Chinese Studies and the Office of International and Special Overseas Programs at UCLA and the Kelton Foundation provided support for the illustrations and maps. ![]() Several other grants from the UCLA Academic Senate were also helpful in enabling me to travel to China and engage in further research. ![]() I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities Translation Program for a generous grant that enabled me to take a year off from teaching to begin work on this book. I have excluded works that are not the result of personal experience and those of purely scholarly interest. Important places as well as works suggesting the generic extent of this kind of literature. In general, I have tried to include the monuments of classical Chinese travel writing, neglected examples by some of the notable personalities of Imperial China, works that record journeys to Some are still read in Chinese middle schools and universities today. Many of these works have been canonized by the literary tradition and were widely anthologized in general collections of prose. For in these works, tradition was a particularly powerful guide to artistic choice: early forms, themes, and literary techniques, in addition to the actual places visited, constantly reappear in pieces from later periods. The selections are arranged chronologically by author to suggest both the development and continuity of travel writing through the centuries. The line between these two poles of Chinese travel writing is often obscure, as are the distinctions that are sometimes drawn between the various subgenres of the travel account ( yu-chi ). This anthology focuses on literary pieces, ones characterized by lyrical or autobiographical content, but also includes documentary pieces written as objective records of places or events. Although examples of travel writing are rare for the first two-thirds of Chinese literary history, in the later dynasties it seems that just about every writer of note tried his hand at travel accounts or travel diaries. Amid the abundance of recent works on travel writing in both China and the West, the lack of a comprehensive anthology in English of the voluminous literature from Imperial China has become increasingly apparent. Records of past journeys continue to hold our imaginations both as pioneering itineraries that reduced the distance between cultures and as eyewitness accounts of worlds now lost. The growth of planetary awareness at the end of our century has, among other things, stimulated a renewed interest in travel writing in many countries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |