Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables.

• Author: YANG, SHUHUI
• Position: Review

Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables. By ANNE E. MCLAREN. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 41. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1998. Pp. 340 + illus. $103.75.

Since the publication of Robert Redfield's classic anthropological study Peasant Society and Culture in 1956, many scholars have applied his model of "great tradition" and "little tradition" (later replaced by "elite culture" and "popular culture") in their own fields, usually with an emphasis on the long neglected "popular" side. In the field of traditional Chinese vernacular literature, however, studies in the West in the last three decades have largely focused on literati, and on the role they played in the development of this genre. The publication of Anne McLaren's book, with its emphasis on "popular culture," therefore, is a welcome addition to the scholarship in the field.

This hook is the first monograph in English concerning a group of texts in vernacular Chinese discovered in a tomb at Chengqiao village in Jiading county in the suburbs of Shanghai, in 1967. This cache consists of eleven chantefables (and one play script), published in the Chenghua reign-period (1465-88) of the Ming dynasty, and is believed to contain the earliest surviving examples of the form of popular narrative known as shuochang cihua (chantefable). Prof. McLaren's book comprises eight chapters on the chantefables and related issues, including translation of the lines of the corpus she addresses, copious reference notes, a fourteen-page bibliography of works in European languages, and a fourteen-page bibliography of Chinese and Japanese sources. There are also an annotated list of the chantefable narratives, a glossary of Chinese terms, and ten plates reproducing the original texts.

Chapter one begins by describing how the chantefable texts were discovered and how the author interviewed the peasants involved in the find (she was the first non-Chinese to do so) as well as an official of the local museum, and how she was allowed even to examine and "peruse" the original texts held in the Shanghai Museum. She then presents a detailed account of the genealogy of the Xuan family, to whom the chantefables belonged, and provides background information on the socioeconomic conditions in the area during the Ming dynasty. She argues that, although to modern readers the chantefables appear to be secular texts designed for entertainment, in the fifteenth century "some chantefables were regarded as moralistic texts, fit for...