Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800-1937.

• Author: Guo, Li

Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800-1937. By MARGARET B. WAN. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2020. Pp. xxii + 434. $75.

In Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800-1937, Margaret B. Wan offers a seminal study of traditional drum ballads beyond the theoretical stricture of genre studies. Instead, Wan invites her readers to consider the mutual influences of oral and written cultures by positioning her focus of study on "the regional nature of the drum ballads and the developing relationship between regional culture and national culture" (p. 3) in late Qing to early Republican China. This theoretical stance emphasizes a new epistemological method of conceptualizing "Chinese" culture through the lenses of knowledge transmission, technological innovation, and textual reproduction across space, time, materiality, and mediums. Whereas the eminent Southern tanci [phrase omitted] narratives (performed and textualized) offered rich depictions of everyday life through artistic representations and what Patrick Hanan called "formal realism" (Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981], 25), Wan's study reveals that drum ballads of North China articulated resonant realistic motifs and elements through aesthetic recreation, characterization, and narrative procreation. The ballads achieved immense popularity among their historical readers because of the aesthetic form's special power to portray "the joys and sufferings of ordinary men and women ... in a moving and memorable form" (p. 8). In a contextualized and theoretically informed introduction, Wan situates drum ballads in the greater scene of performed narratives, including Suzhou tanci, Minnanese ballads (gezaice [phrase omitted]) in Fujian, Chaozhou ballads (Chaozhou gece [phrase omitted]), and wooden fish books (muyushu [phrase omitted]) in Guangdong (p. 10).

For Wan, to consider drum ballads in light of the heterogenous landscape of performed narratives is advantageous because, first, this spatialized examination of drum ballads highlights the importance of "local" texts and storytelling traditions in constructing, shifting, and problematizing the centripetal imagination of China as a nation characterized by a unified language tradition (be it classical or Mandarin). Second, a return to the localized textual materials and performed narratives allows a more "aural" form of reading, and thus is inducive to an understanding of regional literatures as alternatives to the "empire-wide bestselling novel" (p. 10). Third, considering drum ballads in relation with other forms of oral performance permits insights into how "regions represent themselves" and allows situated considerations of spatio-temporal definitions of the "region" beyond homogenizing geographical, social, ethnic, cultural, or linguistic parameters. Wan proposes that a study of drum ballads invites a more "fine-grained," interactive, and shifting imagination of a region by considering the following three aspects: "(1) in their publication and circulation as texts, (2) in their relationship to an oral performance context, (3) in some of their content, when the stories took shape in the region in close connection with performance" (p. 12). This model is effective in elucidating drum ballads as dynamic forces in the relation between the regional and national, and in their roles as "forces of both integration and diversity" (p. 12). Based on this framework, the chapters in the book endeavor the following: to reconstruct the context of drum ballads as regional literature and examine their "literary geography" (p. 14) (chapters 1 and 2); to explore literary conceptualization of space in drum ballads, including vertical integration (as in the legal-cultural aspect of court-case ballads) and horizontal integration (as in the stories of Judge Shi and Judge Liu (chapters 3, 4, 5); and to examine the evolvement of drum ballads in print culture through studies of lithographic editions while rethinking the relationship between...