A New Account of the Tales of the World

A New Account of the Tales of the World, also known as Shishuo Xinyu (Chinese: 世說新語), was compiled and edited by Liu Yiqing (Chinese: 劉義慶; 403 – 26 February 444) during the Liu Song dynasty (420–479) of the Northern and Southern dynasties. It is a historical compilation of anecdotes about Chinese scholars, musicians, and artists during the 2nd-4th centuries.

Content

The book contains around 1,130 historical anecdotes and character sketches of around 600 literati, musicians and painters who lived in the Han and Wei–Jin periods (2nd-4th centuries). Chapter 19, for instance, has 32 stories about outstanding women. It is thus both a biographical source and a record of colloquial language. The original text of the book was divided into eight volumes of juan (卷 "scroll"), though current editions generally span ten volumes.

Reception

While most of the anecdotes and personalities are attested in other sources, traditional Chinese bibliographers did not classify Shishuo Xinyu as history, but as a novel / "minor tales" (小說 xiao shuo), a term that was later used to refer to fiction. Some attribute this to its use of colloquial language as well as how it did not follow the historical conventions of the Twenty-Four Histories. The mixture of literary and vernacular styles set the scene for the later tradition of informal Chinese literature. The 20th-century Chinese novelist Lu Xun spoke highly of the book's aesthetic merits.