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As one of the four famous classical Chinese novels, Three Kingdoms has provided Chinese culture with some of its most memorable heroes, such as Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, as well as one of its great villains, Cao Cao. Therefore, a book on its literary and philosophical implications as well as its influence on various forms of popular entertainment, including theatre, is a welcome addition to Chinese and theatre studies. A collection of eleven articles on these themes, Three Kingdoms and Chinese Culture is based on a 2001 conference titled "The Historical, Fictional, Theatrical, and Artistic Three Kingdoms: A Sino-American Colloquium." It includes four sections that focus respectively on the relationship between the novel and Chinese values, Chinese history and historiography, Chinese drama and art, and, finally, the novel's influence on contemporary East Asia.
The three articles in the first section, plus the preface by the novel's English translator, Moss Roberts, provide a good introduction to the basic value system of Three Kingdoms as an embodiment of the core Confucian principles of loyalty, brotherly love, and appropriateness. In the first two articles, "Cosmic Foreordination and Human Commitment: The Tragic Volition in Three Kingdoms " by Constantine Tung and "Essential Regrets: The Structure of Tragic Consciousness in Three Kingdoms " by Dominic Cheung, the authors see the novel as a tragedy featuring clashes between cosmic foreordination and human efforts. Both authors view these heroes through the prism of Greek tragedies, as when Chueng compares Cao Cao's temper to Achilles' wrath (18) or when Tung adopts Aristotelian and Hegelian tragic theories to explain the failures of Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang in fulfilling their ambition to reunite China and restore the Han dynasty.