Zhenduo Zheng - History of Chinese Folk Literature

Series of Modern Chinese Academic Classics comprised the outstanding academic workswritten by Chinese scholars from the late Qing dynasty to the end of the 1980s. The selectedworks were mainly classics, and some collections of masterpieces were appropriately extracted.

The contents and order of arrangement should be kept in their original editions, only theauthors' photos, handwritings, etc. were added in the beginning of each work. While at the end ofthe work the authors' academic chronologies and explanatory articles were attached, which werewritten by the experts and scholars cordially invited and intended to introduce the authors'academic achievements, the background of the books, the academic value and the changes of theireditions.

All the selected works were based on their original editions or the authors' revised or proofreadeditions, with references to collate other editions, thus to correct the errors. Previous quotationswere sometimes omitted or changed. If they did not lose their original meanings, weren't changedin the original text. If corrections were really necessary, footnotes were issued to indicate the basisof the edition, and explain them in the form of editor's note or proofreader's note.

Each author had his own writing style, and each era had its own language habits. Thus, theoriginal text was not modified according to the current usage, writing and technique of expression.If the proper names in the original books (personal name, place name, terminology) and thetranslated names were not unified with the current, they were also kept unchanged. Correctionswould be made for errors of the authors' handwriting, typography, data calculation and foreignspellings.

If the original books were straight (horizontal) traditional, except some special cases, they werechanged to horizontal simplified. If there were no punctuations or only simple punctuations in theoriginal text, the new punctuations would be used to replace them. The proper noun mark wasomitted.

Except in special cases, the notes at the end of the original text were shifted to footnotes, andthe double-line interlinear notes were changed to single-line interlinear notes. Descriptivecatalogue followed its original appearance with a little unity

If the original book was illegible or the pages were incomplete due to its age, according to thenumber of the missing characters signs should be represented. If the number of characterswas difficult to determine, it was expressed as (the above missing) or (the followingmissing) .