SOURCE: Hsia, C. T. “The Military Romance: A Genre of Chinese Fiction.” In Studies in Chinese Literary Genres, edited by Cyril Birch, pp. 337-78. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1974.
In this excerpt, Hsia attempts to define the genre of the military romance, distinguishing such novels from historical novels that focus on a popularized retelling of events. Hsia bases his arguments on novels from the Ming and Ching dynasties that detail, with some embellishment, the battles of the T'ang and Sung eras. Note that Chinese characters in the following essay have been silently removed.
This is a free excerpt of 94 words. There are 17,700 words (approx.
59 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
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