Green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel by Margaret B. Wan (review)

version reveals that this was one of a number of details that was “corrected” for court performance. As noted above, the final two plays are both attributed to Guan Hanqing and focus on the members of the Peach Orchard Brotherhood late in their lives. In both plays, the fleeting nature of life and heroic action is a major theme. Idema and West also note a number of structural similarities that cause them to speculate that perhaps the two plays were written as a pair (p. 236). The Great King Guan and the Single Sword Meeting (Guan dawang dandao hui 關大王單刀會) recounts an incident towards the end of Guan Yu’s life when he attends a banquet hosted by officials of the Kingdom of Wu and thwarts an attempt to coerce him into returning the city of Jingzhou, which the Shu-Han forces had “borrowed” after the battle of Red Cliff. The play is extant in both a Yuan edition and a Maiwang Studio Collection manuscript version—both are translated in their entirety in this volume. Unlike the previous two plays discussed, the last play in the anthology, In a Dream Guan and Zhang, A Pair, Rush to Western Shu (Guan Zhang shuang fu Xishu meng 關張雙赴西蜀夢), is only extant in a Yuan edition. The play conflates the deaths of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, and in the first two acts portrays Liu Bei’s reaction to the news through the mouths of first, a messenger, and then, Zhuge Liang. The final two acts depict a visit paid by the ghosts of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei to the dreaming Liu Bei. While Guan Yu was the lead singer in the final two acts of Single Sword Meeting, Zhang Fei is assigned that role in the final two acts of this play. The resultant focus on Zhang Fei makes the play unique among depictions of the end of the brotherhood. Idema and West point out that the revenge that Zhang Fei demands from Liu Bei prioritizes their personal bond over the needs of their common enterprise, and will doom the latter (pp. 298–99). Another theme of the play is vanitas, powerfully evoked by the arias of the once bold and unruly Zhang Fei as he remembers the glorious deeds performed by the three brothers in their prime, and discovers his limits as a ghost. The translations in Battles, Betrayals, and Brotherhood are, as is typical of Idema and West’s work, colloquial and lively while simultaneously meticulously researched. This volume is a welcome addition to our resources on early drama and the Three Kingdoms story cycle alike, and will no doubt continue to inspire lively class discussions and productive research for some time to come. KIMBERLY A. BESIO Colby College Green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel. By Margaret B. Wan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. xii þ 235 pp. 15 illus. Cloth $70.00. Paper $24.95. Electronic $24.95. Modern histories of traditional Chinese vernacular fiction pay hardly any attention to the late eighteenth-century novel, Green Peony (Lü mudan 綠牡旦), even though it was one of the most popular novels of the last century of the Qing dynasty if we judge by the number of known nineteenth-century editions. The monograph under review is therefore long overdue. Margaret B. Wan’s book-length study is much more, however, than the analysis of a single novel. The title promises us an inquiry into the novel’s link to the rise of martial arts fiction, but that is not its main Book Reviews 61 emphasis. Rather, the author treats Green Peony as the prime example of the genre of “martial romance” (a term coined by herself) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that can be considered a forerunner of the later full-fledged martial arts fiction. At the same time, she is very much concerned with the origins of the martial romance in the performance literature (or at least the performancerelated literature) of the second part of the eighteenth century. This is because, as she shows, both Green Peony and The Picture of Tianbao (Tianbao tu 天豹圖), yet another early example of the martial romance...