Journey to the West
20 May, 2021
890 Other literatures
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great novels of China’s Ming era, and perhaps the most loved. Written in 1592, it draws on the celebrated travels of a real monk from China to India a thousand years before, and on a thousand years of retellings of that story, especially the addition of a monkey as companion who, in the novel, becomes supersimian. For most readers the monk, Tripitaka, is upstaged by this irrepressible Monkey with his extraordinary powers, accompanied by the fallen but recovering deities, Pigsy and Sandy.
Guests
- Julia Lovell
6 episodes
Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London -
Chiung-yun Evelyn Liu No other episodes
Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan - Craig Clunas
5 episodes
Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Trinity College, University of Oxford
Reading list
-
Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China
Cynthia J Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (University of California Press, 2005) Google Books → -
Demons, Gods, and Pilgrims: The Demonology of Hsi-yu Chi
Rob Campany (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 7.1/2 July, 1985) -
Cosmogony and Self-Cultivation: The Demonic and the Ethical in Two Chinese Novels
Rob Campany (The Journal of Religious Ethics, 14.1 Spring, 1986) -
The Journey to the West
Wu Cheng'en (trans. Anthony Yu) (University of Chicago Press, 2012, 4 vols.) Google Books → -
Monkey King: Journey to the West
Wu Cheng'en (trans. Julia Lovell) (Penguin Classics, 2021) Google Books → -
The Hsi-yu Chi: A Study of Antecedents to the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel
Glen Dudbridge (Cambridge University Press, 1970) Google Books → -
Out of the Margins: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction
Liangyan Ge (University of Hawaii Press, 1997) Google Books → -
The Silk Road Journey With Xuanzang
Sally Hovey Wriggins (Basic Books, 2003) Google Books → -
Wordless Test, Empty Hands: The Metaphysics and Materiality of Scripture in Journey to the West
Andrew Hui (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 75.1 June 2015) -
Fictions of Enlightenment: "Journey to the West", "Tower of Myriad Mirrors" and "Dream of the Red Chamber"
Qiancheng Li (University of Hawaii Press, 2004) Google Books → -
Imperial China 900-1800
F. W. Mote (Harvard University Press, 2003) Google Books → -
The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch'i-shu
Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton University Press, 1987) Google Books → -
How to Read the Chinese Novel
David L. Rolston (Princeton University Press, 2014) Google Books → -
Encyclopedia of the Novel
Paul Schellinger (ed.) (Routledge, 1999) Google Books → -
Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic
Hongmei Sun (University of Washington Press, 2018) Google Books → -
Tradition and Creativity: Essays on East Asian Civilizations
Ching-I Tu (ed.) (Transaction Books, 1987) Google Books → -
A Masterpiece of Dissemblance
Vincent Yang (Monumenta Serica, 60.1)
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Programme ID: m000w5hd
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w5hd
Auto-category: 895 (Chinese Literature)