SOURCE: "P'u Sung-ling and His 'Liao-chai Chih-I'—Literary Imagination and Intellectual Consciousness in Early Ch'ing China," in Renditions, Vol. 13, Spring, 1980, pp. 60-81.

In the following essay, the critics provide a thematic overview of P'u's Strange Stories.

I

One of the major tasks of an historian is the search for and depiction of the spirit of an age. But the spirit of an age is forever elusive and tantalizing. This is particularly so if the historian follows only the traditional politico-socio-economic approach in his research and analysis. The gist of the spirit of an age is what Raymond Williams has called "the structure of feeling" and it is nowhere more manifest than in the imaginative literature of an age. Therefore, unless an historian uses literary works as one of the major sources in his studies, he never feels the presence of a "living" age in his mind, and hence...