Instructor: Mr Wong Kai Sum
Date: 7 March 2019
Time: 11:30 am-1:00 pm
Venue: YIA_502
Language: Cantonese
Introduction:
Chinese supernatural literature (zhiguai wenxue 志怪文學) refers to the literature depicting spirits and mysteries. As early as in the Pre-Qin and Han Dynasties, there were already quite a number of documentary sections recording the marvelous. The discussion about supernatural things had been prevailing in the Six Dynasties and panned out in Tang Dynasty, finally bringing about the emergence of supernatural fictions, one of the Chinese literature genres, which “collect mysteries and record the anecdotes”. Afterwards, such supernatural stories frequently appeared in different genres including chuanqi fictions, traditional drama, colloquial tales and classical Chinese fictions. In this workshop, we are going to introduce the formation and development of the idea of “zhiguai”. We will also select several famous works to look into the cultural characteristics of supernatural literature.
