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are covered: myths of culture heroes and dynastic founders, of cosmological origins and miraculous births, of goddesses and love, of fabled lands and strange people. Birrell's Introduction, which confronts general stereotypes of Chinese myth, reviews major theories on myth and myth-making, and critiques recent scholarship on the topic, is generally helpful, if densely written. My undergraduate students and I have consulted all chapters of the book with equal pleasure and profit.
Birrell's Introduction rightly stresses the importance of maintaining a chronological approach to Chinese myth, while criticizing earlier studies that tended to ignore the dating of texts. It is odd that certain chapters in Chinese Mythology ignore chronological order when arranging selected translations on a single topic. The Introduction also emphasizes the polyfunctional nature of myths, though modern literary theory suggests that this attribute is hardly unique to myth. Birrell's interest in this polyfunctionality has led her to repeat narratives verbatim in separate chapters so as 'to reveal their rich aspectual multiplicity' (p. 21). This decision is unfortunate, mainly because Birrell provides little additional information to help the reader interpret the same myths from different angles. Upon occasion, Birrell herself misses golden opportunities to demonstrate polyfunctionality. For instance, a single explanation is furnished for the Hun-tun myth, that it attacks interventionist political policies (p. 99), when another reading readily comes to mind: that we should mistrust our fallible senses, the acquisition of which spelt death for poor Hun-tun.
There are two claims in the book that have puzzled me and confused my students. The first is that Birrell's study manages somehow to exclude the mythic systems of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism (p. 2). Does Birrell intend to present a series of Urtexts here? If so, on what basis has she determined that her passages stand outside the dominant cultural discourse? If anything, Birrell's selections seem overly dependent upon the Confucian Classics. That may explain why her section on women founders and female goddesses is so thin, in spite of her own observation that several important mythic figures (e.g., Hou Chi, Ts'ang Ts'ung, and Hsi-ho) may have begun as women, rather than as men. Birrell's second curious claim, repeated several times in the book, is that mythology is distinct not only from philosophy and religion, but also from history and literature (e.g., pp. 161). In view of the scholarly controversy over all these terms (Birrell herself mentions 50-odd definitions for myth alone), the reader needs some clarification