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Journey to the West

Melvyn Bragg discusses the much loved Chinese novel from 1592, featuring Monkey, Tripitaka, Sandy and Pigsy, as they travel to India to bring back Buddhist texts.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great novels of China鈥檚 Ming era, and perhaps the most loved. Written in 1592, it draws on the celebrated travels of a real monk from China to India a thousand years before, and on a thousand years of retellings of that story, especially the addition of a monkey as companion who, in the novel, becomes supersimian. For most readers the monk, Tripitaka, is upstaged by this irrepressible Monkey with his extraordinary powers, accompanied by the fallen but recovering deities, Pigsy and Sandy.

The image above, from the caricature series Yoshitoshi ryakuga or Sketches by Yoshitoshi, is of Monkey creating an army by plucking out his fur and blowing it into the air, and each hair becomes a monkey-warrior.

With

Julia Lovell
Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London

Chiung-yun Evelyn Liu
Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

And

Craig Clunas
Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Trinity College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

52 minutes

Last on

Thu 20 May 2021 21:30
蜜芽传媒 Radio 4

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LINKS AND FURTHER READING

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READING LIST

Cynthia J Brokaw and Kai鈥搘ing Chow, Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2005)

Rob Campany, 鈥楧emons, Gods, and Pilgrims: The Demonology of Hsi-yu Chi鈥� (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 7.1/2 July, 1985)

Rob Campany, 鈥楥osmogony and Self-Cultivation: The Demonic and the Ethical in Two Chinese Novels鈥� (The Journal of Religious Ethics 14.1 Spring, 1986)

Wu Cheng鈥檈n (trans. Anthony Yu), The Journey to the West (University of Chicago Press, 2012, 4 vols.)

Wu Cheng'en (trans. Julia Lovell), Monkey King: Journey to the West (Penguin Classics, 2021)

Glen Dudbridge, The Hsi-yu Chi: A Study of Antecedents to the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1970)

Liangyan Ge, Out of the Margins: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction (University of Hawaii Press, 1997)

Sally Hovey Wriggins, The Silk Road Journey With Xuanzang (Basic Books, 2003)

Andrew Hui, 鈥榃ordless Test, Empty Hands: The Metaphysics and Materiality of Scripture in Journey to the West鈥� (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 75.1 June 2015)

Qiancheng Li, Fictions of Enlightenment: "Journey to the West", "Tower of Myriad Mirrors" and "Dream of the Red Chamber" (University of Hawaii Press, 2004)

F. W. Mote, Imperial China 900-1800 (Harvard University Press, 2003)

Andrew H. Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch鈥檌-shu (Princeton University Press, 1987)

David L. Rolston, How to Read the Chinese Novel (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Paul Schellinger (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Novel (Routledge, 1999), especially 鈥楥hina I: Until 1900鈥� by Robert E. Hegel

Hongmei Sun, Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic (University of Washington Press, 2018)

Ching-I Tu (ed.), Tradition and Creativity: Essays on East Asian Civilizations (Transaction Books, 1987), especially 鈥楾he 鈥淥bscure Way鈥� of The Journey to the West鈥� by Anthony Yu

Vincent Yang, 鈥楢 Masterpiece of Dissemblance鈥� (Monumenta Serica 60.1)


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  • Thu 20 May 2021 09:00
    蜜芽传媒 Radio 4
  • Thu 20 May 2021 21:30
    蜜芽传媒 Radio 4

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