Insects in Chinese Literature: A Study and Anthology by Wilt L. Idema (review)

Animal studies has been flourishing across the boundaries of many humanities disciplines in the past decade. Interestingly, another important book on animals in Chinese history appeared in 2019, which is Animals through Chinese History. Earliest Times to 1911, edited by Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Vertebrate animals, particularly those that closely interact with humans, attract more attention than other animals. Wilt L. Idema's new book Insects in Chinese Literature is the first comprehensive volume on the images of various insects in Chinese literature through the ages, with a focus on the premodern period. Although the subject on animals in Chinese literature has appeared in both Asian- and Western-language scholarship, very few books and articles have been devoted to insects or mostly invertebrates. In this sense, Idema's new book occupies a unique position of adding a welcoming reference to our understanding of animals in Chinese literature and even Asian literature in general. Furthermore, for the first time, through lucid and concise translations, this book makes many obscure Chinese popular literary texts accessible to the English-speaking world.

Idema starts his book by noting modern writer Lu Xun's famous essay on the insects in the Hundred-Plant Garden at his parents' home. He traced it back to Lu's connection with a Dutch novel De kleine Johannes perhaps via its German version during Lu's study of medicine in Japan in the early twentieth century. He then categorizes Chinese literature before the Literary Revolution in 1917 and the May Fourth Movement in 1919 into three traditions based on the practical means and purposes in the daily life of readers: texts for study and recitation, texts for entertaining reading, and texts for performance and listening. The first category refers to the tradition of belles lettres, the second category refers mostly to classical and narrative literature, and the third one refers to popular literature. Idema's book divides the majority of texts he studied and translated into two big groups: belles lettres texts (nine chapters for part 1) and popular literature (four chapters for part 2). In contrast, the narrative literature section has only one chapter in between.

Part 1 focuses on insects as individuals and groups in a broad—not strictly scientific—sense, such as the silkworm, cicada, mayfly, click beetle, firefly, moth, mantis, spider, ant, bee, butterfly, cricket, grasshopper, locust, fly, mosquito, scorpion, louse, flea, and bedbug. Given the myriad species on our planet, these insects represent only a small portion in nature. Yet, in terms of their representations in Chinese literature and especially in contemporary scholarship, Idema's book already offers a comprehensive account of many insects. This group of insects seems to be closely connected to human life than many other insects, which is why they frequently appeared in premodern Chinese authors' writings. The first nine chapters of part 1 compiled and translated numerous excerpts from the tradition of belles lettres, including various genres such as poems (shi), rhapsodies (fu), lyrics (ci), arias (qu), and essays (wen), chronologically arranged from the earliest sources to the most present. Each chapter has a short and concise introduction explaining literary and cultural backgrounds about the selected literary texts, and its main section is the translations of excerpts. These brief introductions might not be adequate from the perspective of cultural history, but they serve as excellent guides for reading translations. For instance, chapter 1 deals with the silkworm, perhaps the most important worm for sericulture in Chinese history. Idema introduced how it was represented in some classical accounts such as the Book of Poems and the Book of Xunzi, as well as in medieval poems, but omitted many studies on cultural history. For instance, Stuart Young noted how medieval Chinese Buddhism treated silkworms. Idema did not rely on Angela Sheng's solid research on the silk as currency on...