Mirage

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

The young son of the head of the Chinese Traders' Association is burdened with responsibility for his powerful family upon his father's sudden death. A latter-day Baoyu, but with stronger sexual impulses, the son learns to tame his own libido and conduct himself prudently in Guangzhou society. This is the story of a comparatively little-knownand little-studied novel called Shenlou zhi, which is translated here for the first time. This strikingly original work develops the culture of adolescence that was first described in Honglou meng and also relishes the romantic conventions of Shuihu zhuan.

Reviews

"Patrick Hanans most recently published translation, Mirage is historically significant for two reasons. First, the 1804 novel is the earliest to describe the lives of Guangdong merchants who traded with the West. Second, it is the last translation completed by Patrick Hanan, the foremost scholarly authority on premodern Chinese short fiction in the Western world and a prolific translator of that same fiction, before his death in 2014. In both his translation and his scholarship, Hanan was relentlessly attentive to the elegant touches that animated works of fiction like Mirage, to works that took seriously the craft of entertainment and the lives and values of ordinary people." Dylan Suher, Asymptote

"The anonymous author of Mirage fuses the tropes of its literary forebears to create a compelling portrait of a society on the cusp of a destabilising modernity, with the structuresbureaucratic, military and socialwhich have held the Empire in place becoming corrupted and weakened by avarice and moral decrepitude.the late Harvard scholar Patrick Hanan has rendered the novel into a clear, vernacular English, and has avoided weighing the edition down with lengthy footnotes or commentaries; this is very much a translation to be read and enjoyed. Asian Review of Books

Mirage is a key work from the critical period of the early nineteenth century. It resembles a modern-day R-rated movie, touching on serious issues but containing scenes of explicit sexual pleasure and violent conflict.Keith McMahon

Author Bio

Patrick Hanan (1927-2014) was the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Chinese Literature, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He was the author of The Chinese Short Story, The Chinese Vernacular Story (a history of the genre), Essays on Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, and The Creation of Li Yu, and the translator of many works of Chinese traditional fiction, including The Carnal Prayer Mat and The Sea of Regret. Mirage was his last translation of Chinese fiction.