World without Ghosts: Ghosts and Monsters in Ancient Chinese Fiction

This book is a reading note on ancient Chinese supernatural novels by Yougui Jun, aiming to depict the world of ghosts and monsters as a self-sufficient, self-consistent, and self-operating imaginative community, in order to understand the ancient people's world of faith. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is the world of ghosts. The author combs through various imaginations of the ancient people about the world of ghosts from supernatural novels, splices them together, and depicts a series of aspects such as politics, economy, culture, and society. The second part is the world of monsters, mainly introducing fox spirits, as well as other representative monsters in Chinese traditional culture such as flower spirits and snake spirits, and discussing their entanglement with human society.