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Reviewed by:
  • Lexikon der chinesischen Literatur
  • Karin Betz (bio)
Volker Klöpsch and Eva Müller , editors. Lexikon der chinesischen Literatur. München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2004. 446 pp. Hardcover €39.90, ISBN 3-406-52214-9.

Coming across this rather unpretentious 446-page-strong volume, the first thing one might ask oneself is: is this really the first German dictionary of Chinese literature? Surprisingly enough, it is. After well over a hundred years of Chinese studies in Germany, the editors, supported by a team of forty-nine academicians in the field of Chinese literary studies in Germany, have presented for the first time a compendium of both classical and modern Chinese literature with over four hundred entries.

This is a literary handbook in alphabetical order that features authors, titles of well-known literary works, keywords on Chinese culture and history, major literary collections, terms of literary theory, and the history of printed matter in China. Also, the term "literature" is taken in a broad sense, such that works of Chinese philosophy and historiography are included as well. This considered, the size of the volume appears rather small. Naturally, one could argue that each of the fields just mentioned deserves a separate tome and could easily command hundreds of entries. But while comprehensive guides to Chinese literary history in German, like Hellwig Schmidt-Glintzer's one-volume Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur (München, 1999) or Wolfgang Kubin's Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur in nine volumes (München, 2002) are readily available (five volumes in print so far), it is not the aim of this dictionary to provide detailed knowledge for strictly academic expert use. As they state in their introduction, editors Volker Klöpsch of the University of Cologne and Eva Müller, professor emerita at Humboldt University, Berlin, have tried rather to offer a compendium for the generally interested non-academic readership with no knowledge of Chinese, to remedy the obvious lack of awareness of the field of Chinese literature in the German-speaking world, a fact to which they jocularly make reference by quoting a newspaper article mentioning a certain Mr. Xingjian, the first Chinese Nobel Prize winner in literature, in 2000.

They explicitly state that the sinologist will certainly gather more fruitful information from any Chinese-language literary dictionary, which is why they have not included any Chinese or Japanese language references in their abundant notes on translations into Western languages and further readings for each entry.

Two more editorial decisions determine the size of the dictionary: the equal proportion between classical (pre-1919) and modern Chinese literature, their historical disproportion notwithstanding, and the focus on titles that are readily available in translations into Western languages (English, German, and French, [End Page 182] respectively). In this regard, the editors are very cautious about whom to include or not include. An English reader with a knowledge of German who might wish to consult the dictionary will be surprised not to find, for example, well-established menglong poets like Xie Fengsheng or Yang Mu-arguably due to the lack of translations of their work into German rather than to their relative literary significance.

This pragmatic approach, though understandable as an editorial decision, is both a merit and a demerit of this volume. To be sure, many students of Chinese literature will want to make use of this affordable, up-to-date resource, in such a practical size. But they will miss more than the exclusion of certain entries that had to be left out in order to keep the handbook a handbook: they will also miss having Chinese characters for the names of authors and technical terms. While pen names and hao are given in pinyin, as well as pinyin for literary terms that form an entry (like "difang xi" for Lokaloper, i.e., local opera)-which will be of little use indeed for readers with no knowledge of Chinese-Chinese characters would have added considerable value for the student and scholar looking for broader information on a particular author in Chinese and having difficulty identifying the right name.

Certainly a welcome feature of the dictionary is the inclusion of a broad range of modern twentieth-century authors...

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