P’u Sung-ling

Pu Songling,
Wade-Giles romanization P’u Sung-ling, courtesy name
(zi) Liuxian, or Jianchen (b. June 5, 1640, Zichuan
[now Zibo], Shandong province, China—d. February 25,
1715, Zichuan), Chinese fiction writer whose
Liaozhai zhiyi (1766; “Strange Stories from
Liaozhai’s Studio”; Eng. trans. Strange Stories from
a Chinese Studio) resuscitated the classical genre
of short stories.
Pu’s impressive
collection of 431 tales of the unusual and
supernatural was largely completed by 1679, though
he added stories to the manuscript as late as 1707.
The work departed from the prevailing literary
fashion that was dominated by more realistic huaben
stories written in the colloquial language. Pu
instead wrote his stories in the classical idiom,
freely adopting forms and themes from the old
chuanqi (“marvel tales”) of the Tang and Song
dynasties.
Although Pu lived
and died as an obscure provincial schoolteacher, his
work gained fame when it was first printed some 50
years after his death, inspiring many imitations and
creating a new vogue for classical stories. He is
credited with having adapted several of his tales
into “drum songs,” a popular dramatic form of the
time. The colloquial novel Xingshi yinyuanzhuan (c.
1644–61; “A Marriage to Awaken the World”; Eng.
trans. The Bonds of Matrimony), which realistically
portrays an unhappy contemporary marriage, was
attributed to him by some scholars.