Damei Kunqu 大美崑曲 (The great beauty of Kun opera) by Yang Shousong 楊守松 (review)

performance traditions. Her analysis of rare materials, including true storyteller’s scripts, also suggests new possibilities for the relationship between jianben and fanben editions of the novel Shuihu zhuan. More detailed knowledge about the storytellers’ verbal art in performance may provide a key to several of the more disputed questions in the history of vernacular literature and call attention to the continued interaction between the oral narrative milieu and the culture of print. As Børdahl notes, “present-day oral arts may give us a key to unlock many secrets of the vanished oral traditions. Even if findings in contemporary oral storytelling can only be suggestive for earlier periods, they have the potential to illuminate significant questions” (p. 7). Wu Song Fights the Tiger is a beautiful book, nicely laid out and fully illustrated, with color printing used in some of the tables to make the complicated relationships between texts or linguistic registers clear at a glance. It is full of gems of thoughtful insight based on Børdahl’s detailed analysis of this vast array of material and her deep knowledge of living storytelling. Her findings have compelling implications for anyone interested in Chinese literature, performance, and/or oral theory. Børdahl’s careful attention to the special characteristics of each form, and the way she makes them stand out through comparison, creates an essential resource and model for scholars. The Wu Song database (available on the Chinese Storytelling website www.shuoshu.org under “Research Database on Chinese Storytelling”), which contains all the texts analyzed in the book and more, is another wonderful tool that will serve as a launching pad for many future studies. With its encyclopedic range and rigorous methodology, Wu Song Fights the Tiger is a major contribution to the field that will be widely read and inspire further research. MARGARET B. WAN University of Utah Damei Kunqu 大美崑曲 (The great beauty of Kun opera). By Yang Shousong 楊守松. Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi, 2014. iiiþ301 pp. Paper RMB 35.00. I confess that the title Damei Kunqu (The great beauty of Kunqu) led me to believe that I would be reading an appreciation of Kunqu performance in the vein of those one often sees in the bookstores or on Chinese television, from such celebrity academics as Yu Dan 于丹, Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇, or Yu Qiuyu 余秋雨. This book does belong to the same general genre of culture boosterism, but avoids the soft-focus approach on indefinable qualities such as “beauty,” “classicism,” or “tradition” that often characterize popular works. This book occupies a major place in the peculiar and consequentialgenre of Kunqufanliterature, inthatit ishugely knowledgeablewithout being the slightest bit analytical. This book is both a testament to and a record of Kunqu hitting the pan-Sinophone bigtime in the last decade. In the end, aesthetics rarely enter into Yang Shousong’s text, which is pitched somewhere between an occasionally gossipy compendium of anecdotes and a sourcebook of cultural policy as it has affected Kunqu in the PRC, with a heavy bent towards the Open Door period. Structured by Yang’s projects and trips, littered with the names of chairmen of “Save-Kunqu” associations, interview paraphrases, and block quotes, the text is also periodically interpolated with purple praise of Book Reviews 67 Kunqu and exhortations that we, too, must bear responsibility—we must not let Kunqu, eternal heritage of glorious China, down. The style is doubtless the result of Yang’s background as an establishment writer, embedded in the cultural bureaucracy and employed by the city of Kunshan until his retirement in 2005. His flyleaf biographical sketch is the kind that lists the amount of characters published (over 7 million), the number of prizes won (over 70), and the number of volumes in his collected works (19)—a star in that parallel universe of Chinese literature that is the official counterpart to belles-lettres. This results in both great strengths and weaknesses: on the one hand, Yang has access to everywhere and everyone, and evidently the resources to pursue this project over the better part of a decade. We are rewarded with a close inner look at the nitty-gritty of most major Kunqu events within human memory—just how performances of...