“A New Note on Shishuo xinyu”

Few works can match the importance of the book now known as Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 for its portrayal of cultural attitudes and social practices among elites in China from the second to fourth centuries. Its 1130 anecdotes about 626 people from the late Han through the Wei-Jin eras, organized into thirty-six categories of human behavior, provide a depth of richness and detail unparalleled in other extant sources from that age. Richard Mather’s meticulously researched and unabridged translation of this work, along with its major commentary, was published in 1976 as Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World (by Liu I-ch’ing with commentary by Liu Chün).¹ It is nothing short of a masterpiece in the field, a definitive rendition of a text relevant to anyone who wants to better understand elite culture and society in the centuries following the fall of the Han dynasty.

A New Account of Tales of the World has become the standard way of citing the title in English since the publication of Mather’s translation. It is, of course, just one possible translation of a title that has a long and somewhat convoluted history. The text now known as Shishuo xinyu has had at least three related titles in the past—Shishuo 世說, Xu Shishuo 續世說, and Shishuo xinshu 世說新書—which need to be factored into an understanding of its most recent title. Each of the individual characters in the various titles, the pairs of characters (shishuo, xinshu, and xinyu), and the grammatical relationship between the pairs are all open to interpretation. I propose a closer examination of the provenance of the title Shishuo xinyu (and the text to which it is attached) to see if a different English translation might better reflect the original sense of the Chinese title, as far as that can be determined.²

Evidence for understanding the meaning of a book’s title or titles can be broadly divided into intrinsic and extrinsic types. Intrinsic evidence encompasses use of the title in various manuscript and printed editions of the book, the book’s structure, and the nature of its contents (including the prefaces and colophons).³ Extrinsic evidence includes citation and explanation of the book’s title in other texts (bibliographies, collectanea, correspondence, miscellaneous accounts, etc.), other books that may be known by the same or similar titles, and a general consideration of the time and place in which the book was produced to determine its likely audiences and purposes. In what follows, I will present both intrinsic and extrinsic evidence for possible translations of the titles Shishuo, Xu Shishuo, Shishuo xinshu, and Shishuo xinyu.