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n υ 4 . 且 Chinese Literary Criticism The Jen-chien tz'u-hua In form the Jen-chien tz'u-hωadheres closely to the traditional approach to poetic criticism. Comments on poets, on techniques of prosody, on theories of poetry, on genres and periods are mixed together with no attempt at order. The work in its present form consists of two chüan and a supplement. The :first ch伽n was completed by Wang Kuo-wei in 1910 and subsequent1y published in the Kuo-ts'ui hsüeh-pao. It consisted of sixty-four tse (comments). In 1926 Y垃 P'ing-po wrote an introduction to the work and it was republished as a single volume. Then in 1928 Chao Wan-li put together a hitherto unpublished section of the work and published it in the Hsiao-shuo yüeh-pao. This and the original pa此 were then published together as two chüan in the two editions of Wang's collected works.18 In 1939 Hsü T'iao-fu extracted from other works of criticism written by Wang a number of scattered remarks which had a bearing on tz'u; these he brought together to form a supplement to the existing book. The :first two chüan and the supplement , annotated by Hsü, were then published the following year by K'ai-ming Book Company under the title ofChiao-chujen-chien tz'u-hua. There are 129 comments in this edition. Hsü's notes are helpful in that he identi:fies passages from poems quoted by Wang Kuo-wei and adds their full text as well as the texts of all poems mentioned by name only. He did not make any attempt to elucidate any of Wang's comments, however, perhaps feeling that Y垃 P'ing-po was right in saying in his Introduction that trying to explain the remarks would be like ‘adding feet to a snake'. However, Hsü Wen-yü, a scholar who was less cautious in this respect, included the Jen-chien tZ'l• hua in his collection of critical works entit1ed Wen-lun chiang-su (Analysis ofessays on literature), pp. 435-520, in which, besides providing the texts of cited poems, he added many elucidatory comments. Hsü T'iao-fu's edition has remained the standard one on which other more recent editions have been based. One of these is the edition edited by Wang Yu-an published in Peking in 1960 by the Jen-min wen-hsüeh 18 Lo Chen-yü published a limited edition of Wang's works under the title Haining Wang Chung-ch'ueh kung yi-shu (hereafter abbrev. HNWCCKYS) in four sections in 1928. Pelliot wrote a lengthy description and review of the entire work, 'L'edition collective des oeuvres de Wang Kouo咐ei' , T'oung Pao, XXVI (1929), 113-82. In 1940 Chao Wan-li published another edition under the title Hai-ning 耳'ang Ching-an hsien-sheng yi-shu (hereafter abbrev. HNWCAHSYS) in 48 ts治. The two editions are essential1y the same although the latter does not contain one work of particular interest to literary criticism,the T'ang Wu-tai erh- 的的-yi chia tz'u chi,which does appear in the fourth sectionof the former edition. The Jen-chien tz'u-hua 11 ch'u-pan she and reprinted by the Commercial Press in Hong Kong in 1961. Mr Wang has gone even further afield than Hsü T'iao-fu to piece together additional scattered comments by Wang on tz'u from Wang's notes and other unpublished material. These comments plus an added comment made by separating Comment 85 into two parts has brought the total number up to 142. He has not added anything to Hsü T'iao-fu's notes, however, so that his book represents merely an enlargement of Hsü's 1940 edition. In this translation 1 have used the Hsü T'iao-fu edition and numbered the 129 comments consecutively through chüan 1,2,and the supplement. In notes in the supplement 1 have indicated where in Wa峙's works the comments first appeared. Those comments added by Wang Yu-an, including five which he inserted here and there in chüan 2 (which he calls shan-kao 刪稿, or ‘edited edition') and seven added at the end of the supplement, are grouped together in an Appendix. Wang numbered the comments within ch似n so 1 have kept his numbers in the Appendix. ...

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