The podcast starts with a message from listener Amanda, who has been reading all of Dostoevsky for a workshop in Russia. In addressing the podcast's host Sean Guillory, she says (starting at 4:21.5):
I sympathize with you, Sean, that you just couldn't get into him, but I've personally never felt that way about Dostoevsky. I remember trying to read the Lord of the Rings series, and I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand ten pages describing a meadow. And ever since them I've thought of fiction writing in terms of meadow-writing and non-meadow-writing. No wonder I love Dostoevsky — he has nothing whatsoever to say about meadows.
New book in the Cambridge Elements Series Yuanfei Wang and Victor H. Mair Early Globalism and Chinese Literature Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2026
The entire book, richly illustrated in color, is available open access online.
Summary
Exploring 'early globalism and Chinese literature' through the lens of 'literary diffusion,' this Element analyzes two primary forms. The first is Buddhist literary diffusion, whose revolutionary impact on Chinese language and literature is illustrated through scriptural translation, transformation texts, and 'journey to the West' stories. The second, facilitated diffusion, engages with the maritime world, traced through the seafaring journey of Cinderella stories and the totalizing worldview in literature on Zheng He's voyages. The authors contend that early global literary diffusion left a lasting imprint on Chinese language, literature, and culture.
Easier to assimilate and attractively prepared with striking illustrations:
Tom Almeroth-Williams, "The hermit’s best-seller: The only surviving original version of one of late medieval England’s most popular works of literature reveals its secrets", University of Cambridge (1/5/26).
The Vernacular World of Pu Songling Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China Series: Sinica Leidensia, Volume: 173 (2025). xix, 312 pp. By Zhenzhen Lu
A Sino-Indo-Iranian literary-religious-mythic nexus, with a focus on J. C. Coyajee
Für Professor Patrick Dewes Hanan, meinen Doktorvater
People often ask me what the meaning of the morpheme biàn 變 in the disyllabic term biànwén 變文 is. The reason they come to me is because I spent the first two decades of my Sinological career focusing on this genre of medieval popular Buddhist prosimetric (shuōchàng 說唱) narrative.
Wén 文, of course, means "writing; text". No sweat there. But biàn 變 is a thorny problem. It has the following basic meanings:
Before I introduce what to me is one of the most stupendous humanities discoveries I have encountered in the last six decades, I have to explain briefly why it is so exciting. Namely, here we get to witness the emergence of a few bits of vernacular English in a religiously imbued medieval Latin matrix. This is exactly how medieval vernacular Sinitic started to appear in the framework of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic during the heyday of medieval Buddhism. Just as in the medieval Christian homilies of Peterhouse MS 255, we see the common (sú 俗) preachers of Dunhuang resorting to vernacular language and popular "memes" in their "transformation texts" (biàn[wén] 變[文]) to keep the attention of their auditors / readers.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer's (d. 1400) Troilus and Criseyde. That was a long time ago, sixty years, in fact. Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times yesterday and discovered that this medieval romance was back in the news.
900-Year-Old Copyist's Error May Unravel a Chaucer Mystery The Tale of Wade, twice referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems, survives only in a tiny fragment. Two academics argue a scribe’s error deepened the confusion around it. Stephen Castle, NYT (7/15/25)
I thought you’d be interested in a study showing the distribution of “Xanadu” across the web. I first looked into this back in 2010. I’ve now updated that work using ChatGPT o3 (one of the so-called “reasoning” models). It designed the study and executed it.
This report ran all night. And it’s the kind of thing that would have been impossible prior to the internet. Here’s the abstract:
What with all the talk about Taiwanese and Gaelic swirling around Language Log recently, I was serendipitously surprised to find this in my inbox last week:
