Acknowledgments

The project that has crystallized into this present volume took its first step in 1991, when I received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a study of the T’ung-ch’eng school, which dominated the Chinese literary stage from the mid-eighteenth century through the end of the Ch’ing dynasty. In my study I traced the canon back to the Ming author Kuei Yu-kuang, widely considered a predecessor, and I found that while Kuei certainly exerted a great influence on the Ch’ing writers, he was just as much (if not even more so) a man of his own age, an age that saw the rise of the hsiao-p’in, which in many ways is opposed to T’ung-ch’eng prose in its underlying principles. This led me to explore collections of Ming authors and eventually to complete this book.

Summer Research Support Awards, Academic Senate Travel Grants, and Intramural Research Funds from the University of California, Riverside, enabled me to search for and work on primary texts in the East Asian collections of UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford, and to make a sentimental journey back to Harvard’s Widener and Yenching libraries, where I received much help from my friend Daisy Chia-yaung Hu.

The chapter on Kuei Yu-kuang contains material I presented at the 1990 annual meeting of the New England Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) at Smith College, in a panel chaired by Susan Cherniack, a fellow devotee of Tu Fu. The chapter on Chang Tai contains material I presented at the October 1993 Joint Meeting of the International Studies Association, West Region (ISA-West), and Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast (ASPAC) at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. I would like to thank those in both audiences who raised interesting questions and helped me to sharpen my thoughts on related issues.

I am very much indebted to Irving Yucheng Lo, professor emeritus of Indiana University and an old family friend, who read the entire manuscript in the summer of 1995, checking my translation against the originals piece by piece, and sent me a detailed commentary, which helped me to make a thorough revision before I submitted the manuscript to publishers. A tribute is due to my former mentors at Harvard who read the manuscript: Stephen Owen, who first urged me to engage myself in studies of classical Chinese belles-lettres prose; and Patrick D. Hanan for his kind encouragement. I owe an intellectual debt to all previous works on the topic as listed in the Bibliography, but in particular to those of Jonathan Chaves and Chih-p’ing Chou.

I want to thank the two referees for the University of Washington Press for their valuable suggestions. I am honored to receive a nod of assent to the manuscript from Jonathan Chaves, who chose to reveal his identity, and I want to give him another salute here for his pioneering work on the Yüan brothers and his elegant translation, which serves as a model for emulation for me. I am very much obliged to David R. Knechtges, who had remained anonymous until he generously granted permission to use his comments on the jacket, for his staunch support and constructive criticism. To me he has always exemplified the very best of literary and philological scholarship, East or West. At the University of Washington Press, Lorri Hagman’s graceful and meticulous editing, as well as Pamela Chaus’s ingenious design of the text, helped to make this a much better book.

Standing out in what Oscar Wilde called “the diary that we all carry about with us,” that is, memory, are days of my childhood and youth spent with my father, Ye Congqi, who home-schooled me in studies of Chinese classics, and with my eldest brother, Ye Zhi (better known by his pen name Zhu Wan as one of China’s leading translators of Western literature), who taught me most of my English and introduced me to the beauty and diversity of the English essay from Addison and Steele to Max Beerbohm and G. K. Chesterton. My wife, Cora, has kept me afloat throughout my labor of love. I dedicate this book to her, and also to my children, Joy and Sean, who I hope will learn to enjoy the colors, sounds, and tastes in the world around us as much as did our late-Ming ancestors.

YY