Cyril Birch

Cyril Birch was born in Lancashire, England in 1925. He studied Chinese in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he received his Ph.D. in Chinese Literature in 1954. He taught Chinese at his Alma Mater from 1948 to 1960. He joined the Department of Oriental Languages at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960, and was later appointed Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature and Chairman of the department. Upon his retirement in 1991 he was appointed Emeritus Professor by the University of California at Berkeley.

Cyril Birch is the author of a number of books and articles on traditional Chinese fiction and drama as well as modern Chinese literature. He is a well known translator of Ming drama and stories. His translations of The Peony Pavilion (Scenes i-v, vii, ix, x) and three chapters from The Swallow Letter are published in Renditions No. 3 and No. 40 respectively.

While Cyril Birch has edited and authored a number of general anthologies of Chinese literature, his favourite genre remains that of classical drama. The exhibits shown here represent his best-known work of the 1990s¡Xa culmination of a lifetime of scholarship in and dedication to traditional Chinese drama.

Major Publications:

  • Mistress and Maid: Jiaohongji. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
  • Scenes for Mandarins: the Elite Theater of the Ming. New York: Columbia University Press,
       1995.
  • Studies in Chinese Literary Genres. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
  • Anthology of Chinese Literature from Earliest Times to the Fourteenth Century.
       Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
  • Anthology of Chinese Literature. New York: Grove Press, 1965-72.
  • Chinese Communist Literature. New York: Praeger, 1963.
  • Chinese Myths and Fantasies. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
  • Stories from a Ming Collection: Translations of Chinese Short Stories Published in the
       Seventeenth Century    . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1958; New York: Grove Press,
       1958; London: Bodley Head, 1958.

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