Introduction

Notes Introduction 1 He Bang’e, Yetan suilu, 87. See also Yetan suilu, http://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chap ter=353567&remap=gb. Accessed 7/1/2016. 2 The Qing government issued frequent prohibitions of “dirty writing” and fiction (yinci xiaoshuo 淫詞小說), although such prohibitions had little real effect. A well-known memorial by Ding Richang 丁日昌 in 1868 regarding prohibited fiction also mentions songbooks. See Shi Changyu, “Qingdai xiaoshuo jinhui shu lüe,” 65–75. Many precious scrolls (baojuan 寶卷) contain injunctions not to read, buy, or sell songbooks, and to burn them when you find them. They often group songbooks together with fictionxiaoshuo ( ) or “dirty books” (yinshu 淫書). 3 Idema, Chinese Vernacular Fiction; Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction; Brokaw, Com merce in Culture; and Shang Wei, “The Literati Era and Its Demise,” 266–70. 4 David Johnson, “Communication, Class, and Consciousness,” 65. 5 Zheng Zhenduo, Zhongguo suwenxue shi, 1:9–10. 6 Wilt Idema notes that most histories of Chinese literature in China and the West omit prosimetric and ballad literature or only mention it in passing. Idema, “A Brief Survey.” Notable exceptions include several essays in The Columbia His tory of Chinese Literature, ed. Mair; and Idema’s chapters on “Dunhuang Nar- ratives” and “Prosimetric and Verse Narrative” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature. Specialized studies of popular performance genres include Bender, Plum and Bamboo; Børdahl, The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytell ing, and Børdahl, Wu Song Fights the Tiger; McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables; and Wan, “TheChantefable and the Novel.” As Idema has noted, recent Western studies of prosimetric and ballad literature (shuo chang wenxue 說唱文學) tend to favor certain genres, especially baojuan (precious scrolls), tanci 彈詞 (lute ballads), and zidishu 子弟書 (bannermen tales). For English-language scholarship on baojuan up to 2012, see Idema, “En- glish-Language Studies of Precious Scrolls.” Baojuan studies is a growing field, and many publications have appeared since 2012, including those by Idema and Berezkin. Studies of tanci, with a few exceptions such as Bender’s work, focus largely on the more literary, female-authored tanci rather than texts related to Margaret B. Wan - 9781684176076 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 04:18:34AM via free access 332 Notes to Pages 5–7 performance. On zidishu, see Chiu, Bannermen Tales; and Cui Yunhua, Shuzhai yu shufang zhijian. 7 From Liu Gong an, manuscript drum ballad, in Capital Library. Reprinted in QMCWF, vol. 13, “Duchayuan” 都察院, 1.18a–21a. Cf. LGA, 361–63. 8 See McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables, 38; and Bäuml, “Medieval Texts,” 41–43. 9 The drum ballad’s tendency toward “showing” contrasts with the novel’s tendency toward “telling.” To use Linda Hutcheon’s way of putting it, “to tell a story, as in novels, short stories, and even historical accounts, is to describe, explain, summarize, expand; the narrator has a point of view and great power to leap through time and space and sometimes to venture inside the minds of characters. To show a story, as in movies, ballets, radio and stage plays, musicals and operas, involves a direct aural and usually visual performance experienced in real time.” Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 12–13. While our concern here is with drum ballad texts, the contrast between the two modes of “telling” and “showing” is quite apparent when one compares the drum ballads on the Judge Shi legend with the bare-bones plot related in the novel. 10 Cf. the idea of character-space in Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many. While the drum ballads frequently use epithets that label and “contain” characters as particular types (such as “upright official” or “lascivious nun”), some tension re- mains between these labels and the verse passages that present the characters’ own point of view. 11 Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 92, 94. 12 St Clair, The Reading Nation, 77. 13 St Clair, The Reading Nation, 79. 14 For the concept of “horizon of expectations,” see Jauss and Benzinger, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” Its relevance to the Chinese drum ballads will be discussed in chapter 2. 15 Rawski, “Economic and Social Foundations.” 16 Rawski, “Problems and Prospects,” 400, 403. 17 Brokaw, “Reading the Best-Sellers,” 219. 18 Rawski, “Economic and Social Foundations,” 32. 19 Rawski, “Economic and Social Foundations,” 33. 20 David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice. 21 See Idema, Meng Jiangnü; Filial Piety and Its Divine Rewards; White Snake and Her Son; Butterfly Lovers; Kwa and Idema, Mulan; and Resurrected Skeleton. Idema has also written several books focusing on particular types of regional performance literature, including Heroines of Jiangyong; Passion, Poverty, and Travel; and Immortal Maiden Equal to Heaven. 22 Boris Riftin discusses the overlap between popular prints and storytelling in “Chinese Performing Arts and Popular Prints.” It is worth noting that drama, storytelling, and popular prints also featured stories found only in a particular location. My findings for the legend of Judge Liu discussed in chapter 5 demonstrate this, as does David Johnson’s analysis of popular prints in “Opera Imag- ery in the Village.” The question of “local” stories and in what ways they relate Margaret B. Wan - 9781684176076 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 04:18:34AM via free access Notes to Pages 7–9 333 to a place is discussed throughout the volume edited by Altenburger, Wan, and Børdahl, Yangzhou—A Place in Literature. 23 Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Ritual. 24 Brokaw, Commerce in Culture, 8–19. 25 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 143–97. 26 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 186. 27 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 187. 28 Brokaw, Commerce in Culture, 532–33. 29 Brokaw, Commerce in Culture, 557–59. She notes that the flexibility of association in Chinese book culture has parallels in the ritual system, which allowed par- ticipants to have their cake and eat it too, both participating in a unified cen- trally organized culture and celebrating their local or regional differences. See Watson, “Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites.” 30 Lucille Chia’s book Printing for Profit is an impressive study of regional publishers. Although it roots the industry in the northern Fujian region in social, intellec- tual, and economic terms, it focuses on a publishing center that sold its imprints throughout China, with an audience beyond the region. My focus on drum ballads puts the emphasis instead on works that I will demonstrate were both produced and consumed within the region of North China (until the rise of lithographic printing). This appeal to a “geographically limited” audience gives us a different perspective. 31 Earlier ballads like the Ming Chenghua chantefables might be seen as a snap shot of a genre at one particular time. On the sixteen chantefables found in a grave, see McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables; and Idema, Judge Bao and the Rule of Law. 32 Li Yu et al., Zhongguo guci zongmu. 33 The late Qing and Republican period witnessed an explosion in the publication of novels. From 1912–20, novels published as books (dan xing ben 單行本) num- bered 2364. See Liu Yongwen, Minguo xiaoshuo mulu. While there were also thousands of novels published in newspapers and periodicals at this time, as far as book culture is concerned, comparison shows that drum ballads were being published on a significant scale. 34 Notable exceptions include Idema, “Popular Literature: Part II: Prosimetric Liter- ature,” in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature; Idema and Haft, A Guide to Chinese Literature, 234; Idema, “Prosimetric and Verse Nar rative,” 367–70; and Shang Wei, “The Literati Era and Its Demise,” 327–28. 35 Zhao Jingshen, Guci xuan; Ōtsuka Hidetaka, “Chū’ō kenkyūin rekishi gogen kenkyūsho: sekiin koshi fudaki (sono ichi)”; Ōtsuka Hidetaka, “Sekiin koshi ken kyu (sono ni)”; Hu Hung-po, “Qingmo Minchu xiuxiang guci kanben sanshier zhong xulu”; Hu Hung-po, “Qingmo Minchu xiuxiang guci bai sanshi zhong zonglun”; Li Yu et al., Zhongguo guci zongmu; and Li Yu et al., Qingdai muke guci. The works of Ōtsuka, Hu Hung-po, and Li Yu largely complement each other; Li Yu catalogs drum ballads in twenty-one collections in China, while Ōtsuka and Hu Hong-po catalog drum ballads in Taiwan. When used together in conjunction with the general catalog of the Academia Sinica collection, they Margaret B. Wan - 9781684176076 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 04:18:34AM via free access 334 Notes to Pages 9–12 give a good overview of drum ballad texts. The only literary history to date to focus on drum ballads is Li Xuemei et al., Zhongguo guci wenxue fazhan shi. It traces drum singing, very broadly defined, from the pre-Qin era through present-day lists of intangible heritage. This approach, which emphasizes con- tinuity and ancient roots, is consonant with many histories of Chinese popular literature. Li Xuemei’s book goes into a wealth of detail on selected topics regarding drum ballads, including attention to physical format in the Qing and to performance contexts in the Republic. 36 Brokaw, Commerce in Culture; Cui Yunhua, Xiaoshi de minyao; Des Forges, Mediascape Shanghai; Goldman, “The Nun Who Wouldn’t Be”; Hanan, Illu“ sion of Romance”; Olivová and Børdahl, eds., Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou; Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai; Altenburger, Wan, and Børdahl, eds., Yangzhou—A Place in Literature. Early on, Hanan noted the importance of “Hangzhou realism” to the vernacular short story of the middle period; see Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 60–61. 37 Meyer-Fong, “Printed World.” Studies of publishing in North China to date have focused on Beijing, including Widmer, “Honglou Meng Ying and Its Pub- lisher”; Cui Yunhua, Shuzhai yu shufang zhijian; Keulemans, Sound Rising from the Paper; and Reed, “Dukes and Nobles Above.” 38 Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou, 292.

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