1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910984682303321

Autore

Gregory Scott W

Titolo

Bandits in Print : The Water Margin and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca : , : Cornell University Press, , 2023

©2023

ISBN

9781501769207

1501769200

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (192 p.) : ill

Disciplina

895.134609

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Bandits in Print -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Bandits' Reception -- 1. "Falsifying a Biography Brought Him Power": The "Wuding Editions" of Guo Xun -- 2. "One Freshly Slaughtered Pig, Two Flagons of Jinhua Wine . . . and a Small Book": The Censorate Edition -- 3. After the Fire: Li Kaixian, The Precious Sword, and the "Xiong Damu Mode" -- 4. Characters in the Margins: The Commercial Editions -- 5. "The Art of Subtle Phrasing Has Been Extinguished": The Jin Shengtan Edition -- Conclusion: Bandits in Print -- Selected List of Characters -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

Bandits in Print examines the world of print in early modern China, focusing on the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan). Depending on which edition a reader happened upon, The Water Margin could offer vastly different experiences, a characteristic of the early modern Chinese novel genre and the shifting print culture of the era.Scott W. Gregory argues that the traditional novel is best understood as a phenomenon of print. He traces the ways in which this particularly influential novel was adapted and altered in the early modern era as it crossed the boundaries of elite and popular, private and commercial, and civil and martial. Moving away from ultimately unanswerable questions about authorship and urtext, Gregory turns instead to the editor-publishers who shaped the novel by crafting their



own print editions. By examining the novel in its various incarnations, Bandits in Print shows that print is not only a stabilizing force on literary texts; in particular circumstances and with particular genres, the print medium can be an agent of textual change.