Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Yuming He (review)

Scholarly interest in the history of the Chinese book has led to an increased attention to materiality in literary studies. In recent years, a number of important studies have appeared on the subject: Tian Xiaofei, for example, has written on the ways manuscript culture influenced the reception of the poetry of Tao Yuanming.¹ Similarly, Christopher Nugent has argued that manuscript copyists in the Tang gave themselves a much more active role in shaping texts than later, print-influenced scholars would have expected.² The edited volume Writing and Materiality in China includes essays on rubbings (Wu Hung), writings on walls (Judith T. Zeitlin), and the influence of late-Ming print culture on the novel Jin Ping Mei (Shang Wei).³ Richard G. Wang has also examined erotic novellas of the Ming from the perspective of print culture and circulation.⁴ Kathryn Lowry has studied popular songbooks of the Ming,⁵ and Li-ling Hsiao and others have turned to illustrated drama imprints.⁶

He Yuming’s new study, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, is a welcome addition to this growing body of literature in that it not only explores the material circumstances of particular works or genres, but also calls attention to several genres from the Ming that are not frequently studied at all. These include joke books, proto-magazine “drama miscellanies,” and would-be guidebooks to exotic foreign lands. Books of these sorts have, in the author’s words, “disappeared from the map of Chinese bibliographical tradition” (p. 6) due to the prejudices of both Qing-era scholars, who placed high value on “evidential research” style scholarship, and later book collectors, who looked down on this type of allegedly shoddily manufactured goods. He proposes that, as their long publishing histories indicate, these books obviously held some kind of appeal to late-Ming audiences, and she sets about to define just what that appeal was.

The first chapter is concerned with a joke book, the Boxiao zhuji (Pearls to provoke laughter). The category of the joke book is a prime example of a genre that has disappeared from the map but, He argues, is worth reconsideration: decried as unserious in intent and as derivative of other, previously existing texts, it is in actuality the manifestation of a particular late-Ming aesthetic. It derives its humor and sense of novelty from its ability to cross registers of speech promiscuously. To be able to join in the fun, one must be conversant with a wide variety of other texts—a “world of books” (p. 21) in He’s words—including popular dramatic literature, popular song, classical learning, and even the Ming legal code. Such a familiarity and ability to draw upon a “constellation of references” (p. 22) is, according to He, the mark of a certain sophistication and a playful attitude toward textuality that undercuts the stereotypes of the Ming book.

He’s “world of books” is composed of texts in two different registers, “ancient-style writing” or guwen (p. 30) on the one hand, and “common speech” or suyu (p. 43) on the other. The former, she argues, is not the guwen that literati such as the Former and Latter Seven Masters advocated as a prose style and that figures prominently in accounts of Chinese literary history. Rather, it is a more inclusive conception of guwen that is seen reflected in the popular prose anthology Guwen zhenbao. Like the Boxiao zhuji itself, the Guwen zhenbao found itself at the margins of respectability in the Qing and then was virtually forgotten altogether. Yet, by tracing its long printing history in the Ming, He argues that it was more influential than it might appear to have been. The precise relation between...