书名：Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative / 异类：狐狸与帝制晚期中国叙事
定价：368.0
ISBN：9780674010949
作者：Rania Hungtington
版次：1
出版时间：2004-01

内容提要：

书名：Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative / 异类：狐狸与中华帝国晚期的叙事
作者：Rania Huntington (韩瑞亚)
出版社：Harvard University Asia Center (Distributed by Harvard University Press)，2003年
装帧：精装，380页
语种：英文
尺寸：约 15.2*22.9 cm (6 x 9 英寸)

ISBN：978-0-6740-1094-9

简介
在中国讨论超自然，便是“谈狐说鬼”。明清时期的中国充斥着狐狸——这些变形生物跨越了物种、性别和形而上领域的界限。以人形出现时，狐狸既是 immoral 的魅惑者，也是贤妻良母；既是骗子，也是儒家道德的典范。它们是人类可能遭遇的最异质、却又最常见的奇异生物。Rania Huntington 的研究旨在探究一种“异类”的概念，并试图界定“人”的边界。作为帝制晚期中国想象中最模糊不清的异类，狐狸揭示了哪些围绕“人”与“寻常”的边界最常被逾越，也因此最受严防。本书的每一部分都追踪了狐狸所逾越的某一特定边界，并考察了跨越该边界的行为如何随时间而演变：文体与文本的叙事边界；家宅与外部世界；混乱与秩序；人与非人；阶级；性别；性关系；以及从动物到妖怪再到仙人的演进过程。作为“中间生物”，狐狸在道德上是暧昧的，拥有超乎人类但未及神明的力量；如同人类一样，它们也占据着地狱与天界之间的中间空间。

To discuss the supernatural in China is "to talk of foxes and speak of ghosts." Ming and Qing China were well populated with foxes, shape-changing creatures who transgressed the boundaries of species, gender, and the metaphysical realm. In human form, foxes were both immoral succubi and good wives/good mothers, both tricksters and Confucian paragons. They were the most alien yet the most common of the strange creatures a human might encounter. Rania Huntington investigates a conception of one kind of alien and attempts to establish the boundaries of the human. As the most ambiguous alien in the late imperial Chinese imagination, the fox reveals which boundaries around the human and the ordinary were most frequently violated and, therefore, most jealously guarded. Each section of this book traces a particular boundary violated by the fox and examines how maneuvers across that boundary change over time: the narrative boundaries of genre and texts; domesticity and the outside world; chaos and order; the human and the non-human; class; gender; sexual relations; and the progression from animal to monster to transcendent. As "middle creatures," foxes were morally ambivalent, endowed with superhuman but not quite divine powers; like humans, they occupied a middle space between the infernal and the celestial.