SOURCE: Bishop, John L. “Some Limitations of Chinese Fiction.” In Studies in Chinese Literature, pp. 237-47. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.

In this essay, Bishop discusses the difficulty of understanding and enjoying Chinese fiction from a Western perspective. Using the masterworks of the Western literary tradition as a standard, Bishop finds early Chinese fiction deficient in characterization, morality, and rationality.

One wonders what the general reading public has made of the translations of traditional Chinese fiction which have recently appeared in bookstores, in several instances in paper-bound series usually devoted to up-to-date novels of violence and vampires. Chinese colloquial fiction before the coming of Western influences certainly contains enough of both murder and adultery to give the average reader a sense of literary familiarity; but the thoughtful reader must be puzzled by an undefinable inadequacy, by a feeling of literary promise unfulfilled, to which even the student of...