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世說新語

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Text ID
KR3l0002
Date
430–444
Dynasty
劉宋

Shìshuō xīnyǔ 世說新語

A New Account of Tales of the World by 劉義慶 (撰, compiled under his patronage) and 劉孝標 (注, commentator)

About the work

The pre-eminent anecdotal compilation of medieval China and the prototype of the shìshuō tǐ 世說體 genre. Compiled under the aegis of Liú Sòng prince Liú Yìqìng 劉義慶 (403–444), nephew of the dynastic founder Liú Yù 劉裕, the work collects roughly 1,130 short anecdotes about some 600 historical persons of the late Hàn through the Eastern Jìn (c. 150–420 CE). The anecdotes are organized under 36 thematic categories — Déxíng 德行 (Virtuous Conduct), Yányǔ 言語 (Speech), Wénxué 文學 (Letters), Fāngzhèng 方正 (Square Rectitude), Yǎliàng 雅量 (Cultivated Tolerance) and so forth, ending with Chóuxì 仇隟 (Hostility) — illustrating the categories of contemporaneous rénlún jiànshí 人倫鍵識 character appraisal. The accompanying scholarly commentary by 劉孝標 Liú Xiàobiāo (462–521, given name Liú Jùn 劉峻) cites some 400 source works (many no longer extant) and is itself a textual achievement of the first rank: in network terms the citations form a dense web of cross-references, and many short biographical sketches of secondary figures survive only because Liú Jùn quoted them.

Tiyao

No tiyao in the present source file (the SBCK base text carries Yuán Jiǒng’s 袁褧 1535 嘉靖乙未 preface rather than the Sìkù 提要). Yuán Jiǒng’s preface — preserved in the SBCK as KR3l0002_000.txt — offers the standard appreciation: “the Línchuān [prince] in compiling this book selected and synthesized, expressing himself clearly and unencumbered; Xiàobiāo’s notes are able to gather up the various minor histories and tease out their meanings, a glossatorial triumph noticed already by Gāo Sìsūn in Wěilüè 緯略” (臨川撰爲此書採掇綜叙明畼不繁; 孝標所注能收錄諸家小史, 分釋其義詁訓之賞見於高似孫緯略). Yuán reports collating the print against a Sòng edition transmitted from Lù Yóu 陸游 (放翁校刋本) and defends the work against the old charge that the Jìn lost the realm “through pure conversation” (清談亡晉).

Abstract

Compiled in the Yuánjiā 元嘉 era (424–453) at the prince’s court (which also assembled the Yōumíng lù 幽明錄 and other works), with traditional dating between 430 and Liú Yìqìng’s death in 444. Liú Yìqìng is portrayed in Sòng shū 宋書 64 less as the unaided author than as the literary patron under whose name the anecdotes were collected: Yú Jiāxī 余嘉錫 and later scholars (Wang Néngxiàn 王能憲) suspect a small staff of literati at the prince’s seat in Jīngzhōu 荊州 did the actual compilation. The earliest title was simply Shìshuō 世說 or Shìshuō xīnshū 世說新書; the present title Shìshuō xīnyǔ is first attested in the Northern Sòng, the change probably driven by the need to distinguish the work from the Hàn-era Shìshuō of Liú Xiàng 劉向 (now lost). The Liáng-dynasty commentary by 劉孝標 Liú Xiàobiāo became inseparable from the text by the Táng, when it was already an essential reference work for poets and aristocrats.

The transmitted text is in three juàn divided into 36 sections; older catalogs (Suí shū Jīngjí zhì 隋書經籍志, JiùTáng shū Jīngjí zhì 舊唐書經籍志) list it variously as 8 or 10 juàn, presumably reflecting different printing arrangements rather than substantive variants. The standard modern critical edition is the Shìshuō xīnyǔ jiānshū 世說新語箋疏 of Yú Jiāxī (1937, repeatedly reprinted), supplemented now by the Shìshuō xīnyǔ huìjiào huìzhù huìpíng 世說新語彙校彙注彙評 (Zhōu Xīnglù et al., 2017).

Translations and research

  • Mather, Richard B., tr. 2002 (1976). A New Account of Tales of the World. 2nd edn. CCS (Michigan). Complete scholarly English translation, including Liú Jùn’s commentary, with full apparatus.
  • Qian, Nanxiu. 2001. Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo Hsin-yu and Its Legacy. UHP. Examines both the work and some 30 Shìshuō-style anecdote collections from the Táng to the early 20th century.
  • Chen, Jack W. 2021. Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu. HUP. Thematic chapters on network structure, performance, praise and insult.
  • Yú Jiā-xī 余嘉錫. 1937 [rev. edn. 1983]. Shì-shuō xīn-yǔ jiān-shū 世說新語箋疏. Zhōnghuá.
  • Zhōu Xīng-lù 周興陸 et al., eds. 2017. Shì-shuō xīn-yǔ huì-jiào huì-zhù huì-píng 世說新語彙校彙注彙評. 3 vols. Fènghuáng.
  • Wāng Wéi-huī 汪維輝. 2007. Hàn-yǔ cí-huì shǐ xīn-tàn 漢語詞彙史新探 — on linguistic value of Shìshuō vernacular.
  • Nicoll-Johnson, Evan. 2018. Drawing out the essentials: Historiographic annotation as a textual network. JCLC 5.2 — quantitative analysis of Liú Jùn’s commentary.

Other points of interest

The 36 thematic chapter-headings are an early Chinese exercise in formal psychology: they organise the social repertoire of the medieval elite (admiration, restraint, mockery, self-fashioning) into a typology that influenced subsequent biographical and physiognomic literature. The chapter Xiányuán 賢媛 (Worthy Beauties) is the locus classicus for an alternative tradition of female biography parallel to the Liènǚ zhuàn 列女傳 lineage. The work is also a key witness for medieval colloquial Chinese, since the direct speech preserves Eastern-Jìn idiom that the zhèngshǐ 正史 chronicles tended to flatten into literary register.

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