Video/Book News

Joël Bellassen
Chinese Step by Step

A video course in spoken Chinese for beginners, Chinese Step by Step is intended for university students, high-school students, or anyone with an interest for Chinese. The course materials include 270 minutes of films on three videocassettes; an accompanying booklet providing the texts and exercises for films in three languages, French, English and Chinese, as well as in Chinese pinyin transcription. For more information, contact: ENS Lettres et Sciences Humaines ENS Editions: Parvis Rene Descates 69 007 Lyon, France. Tel: 01 41 12 36 21; Fax: 01 41 36 23; E-mail: trize@ens-fcl.fr

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Yenna Wu
Ameliorative satire and the Seventeenth-Century Chinese Novel Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan—Marriage as Retribution, Awakening the World. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.

This is a comprehensive study of the ameliorative satire as a genre in classical Chinese fiction. Yenna Wu traces the genealogy of the genre from the late Ming to the mid-Qing and delineates a fascinating aspect of Chinese fiction. This book can serve as a sourcebook for readers interested in gender, religion, martial ethics and the practice of everyday life in late imperial China.