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Reviewed by:
  • The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature
  • Daniel Bryant (bio)
William H. Nienhauser, Jr. , editor and compiler; Charles Hartman, associate editor; and Scott Galer, assistant editor. The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature. Volume 2. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 547 pp. Hardcover, $59.95, ISBN 0-253-33456-X.

This volume could almost be reviewed in two sentences. "Buy this book!" would be the first. If this seems too short, it can be elaborated on by reporting that this "volume 2" is easily the single most useful tool to have been produced by Western students of Chinese literature since, well, volume 1 (1986). In addition to updating all the bibliographies in volume 1 through about 1996 (pp. 201-491), volume 2 provides sixty-three new entries (pp. 1-198). The back matter includes a table of contents for volume 1 (pp. 493-504); a detailed list of errata and corrigenda to volume 1 (pp. 505-516); and name, title, and subject indexes to volume 2 (pp. 517-547). The two volumes together should be the first point of reference for anyone wanting succinct and authoritative accounts of the forms, schools, and authors of Chinese traditional literature, along with full, though not exhaustive, bibliographical references.

A great deal of effort has gone into making it as easy as possible to use this volume in combination with volume 1. Cross-references in volume 2 distinguish between those referring to entries in the same volume and those referring to volume 1. Page x of the front matter includes a clear statement of how the use of volume 2 is to be coordinated with that of volume 1, but the scattering of materials among two separate books is inherently inconvenient. Since the obviously more desirable alternative of publishing a corrected and expanded second edition was not chosen, one is left to infer the existence of some decisive obstacle to doing so, such as incompatible publishing software or demonstrable market resistance. It might have been appropriate to offer a concise account of this obstacle and wherein its decisiveness was felt to lie.

For all the enthusiasm of the first sentence of our brief review, however, the second would have to be something along the lines of "The devil is in the details." And this will unfortunately have to be the theme of most of the rest of this review. Seldom indeed, at least in our field, has the devil got into quite so many details at once. If Murphy's Law seemed often to be at work in volume 1, users of volume 2 may be forgiven the occasional suspicion that Murphy has been appointed to the Supreme Court.

Volume 1 was, after all, widely criticized, even by its most grateful users, for the plethora of typos and other editorial oversights that marred it. It gives me no pleasure to report here that the gremlins have not only not been expelled, they [End Page 170] seem to have been allowed to play their sports at will. Volume 2's densely printed twelve-page list of errata and corrigenda in volume 1, discovered by many readers during years of use, comes to almost one thousand items. I have found about fifty more (see list below), including a few new ones noticed while working on this review. In all then, there are 1,000-odd errata in 1,050 pages of text, for an average of just under one per page. My list of errata for volume 2 (see below), based on only one reading by only one reader, adds up to 670-plus items in 582 (xxxv + 547) pages of text, for an average of about 1.15 per page, and this figure can only go higher as more precincts are heard from. This is not much worse than volume 1, but it was reasonable to expect, given the extensive discussion of problems in the first volume, that it would be much better.

The density of the problems varies from section to section. The text of the new entries is generally in good shape. If the entry on "Late Ch'ing Fiction" (pp. 74-84) has a higher number of errors...

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