China Review International

Margaret Wan's latest monograph, Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture in North China: Drum Ballads 1800-1937, is the culmination of years of [End Page 118] careful and intense scholarship on the subject of northern Chinese "drum ballads" (guci) (p. 71) in the culmination of not only some of the author's major academic interests, but just as importantly the integration of over three generations of scholarly work in the still-understudied field of Chinese oral and oral-connected literature. It is a landmark work in the fullest sense. The work is a deep study of prosimetric narratives transmitted by parallel, and distinct, oral and written means. Numerous styles of orally performed drum ballads that mixed verse, speaking, and simple monologue or dialogue of characters to the accompaniment of patterned percussive beats were performed throughout parts of north, northeast China, and to an extent, southward.

The major focus of the book, however, is on the written strand of the tradition, spanning a period from 1800 to 1937. These texts seem in various ways connected to oral traditions, though what those connections may be has been an ongoing question, as with similar situations between other regional oral and written traditions in China. Discussions throughout the chapters utilize a corpus of about fifty drum ballad texts, most with plots concerning judges and court cases, contextualized within intimate social settings, larger historical trends, and regional contexts, and transmitted in various written formats. The model of transmission of themes, ideas, and even material texts typically includes moves from a nexus of works associated with regional capitals to those "deep in the countryside" that "suggest nested layers of identity" within local cultures (p. 286). In the author's words, a main goal of the work is to see how drum ballads help "investigate important inter-related questions about the relationship between popular literature (oral and written), the formation of regional cultures, and 'national' culture; and about the role that printing (in a variety of technologies) plays in spreading culture" (p. 23).

The volume draws comprehensively on relevant studies in vernacular literature and related fields to give readers tools to examine the larger picture of traditions of Chinese oral performances (close to four hundred) and especially the oral-connected written text traditions (fewer in comparison), often marked with regional characteristics, including local conventions, dialects, and audiences/readerships. While other studies have explored questions related to regional Chinese oral performance and oral-connected literature, few to date have presented such a focused and thought-provoking discussion of a particular "genre" in multiple spaces of circulation and reception in terms of "regional literature" (p. 10), an area that the author feels is understudied in the field of Chinese literature.

Chapter 1 directly examines the idea of "regional" or "local" literature (pp. 17-19) in regional and national contexts, which is not only important for understanding drum ballads and other localized styles of oral traditional literature, but also contributes to the larger discussion of the transmission of information and knowledge in the context of a modernizing state and culture. [End Page 119] These topics in a multicultural China are highly deserving of attention simply due to the vast number of regional oral literatures historically in the country. Yet the study is valuable in many more ways. The author offers a pragmatic "connect the dots" manner of dealing with this complexity of local tradition that allows readers to understand the situation of drum ballad traditions in the north, but in southern areas as well, particularly multicultural Shanghai of the early twentieth century.

Inspired by Cynthia Brokaw's 2007 work on the distribution of Qing dynasty commercial printing products,¹ the author illustrates methods for dealing with local/regional oral-connected text traditions within complex webs of transmission and appreciation that will serve as a model for future studies. Charts showing places and production numbers and corresponding...