Book and Print Culture in Pre-Modern China **

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Studies of the history of the book in China are multifaceted and now, thankfully, quite numerous. The best general introduction is a lengthy essay by Cynthia Brokaw.1 Since I cannot do justice to all contributors to the present state of knowledge-much of their work neatly summarized by Brokaw-I will focus on the vernacular literature of the late imperial period that I know best, with only passing comments on studies of other types of books.Foundational StudiesOver the past century scholars have had great difficulty tracing books from their producers to their consumers, with the consequence that these questions have been addressed obliquely. Studies of fiction production and distribution developed on the basis of learned but random comments on rare books by avid Qing period collectors. But only a few of that generation had deigned to comment on works of fiction.2 Systematic studies began in the 1920s and 1930s. The pioneers include Sun Kaidi ?? ? (1898-1989), who catalogued and commented on editions of vernacular fiction found all over China and in Japan, and Zheng Zhenduo ??? (1897-1958) who traced the early history of several important novels.3 Contemporaries including Wang Zhongmin ??? (1903-1975) expanded this sort of bibliographic work with notes on rare books of all categories in the Library of Congress and elsewhere.4 Lu Xun ?? (1881-1936) wrote the path-breaking and still standard (although superseded by more recent scholarship) history of fiction, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue ??????, in the early 1920s. Recent studies of the novel have been facilitated by the much more extensive knowledge of editions of pre-modern Chinese novels such as the guide compiled by the Japanese scholar Otsuka Hidetaka ? ? ? ? (1949-), the product of years of travel to major collections around the world. 5 And of course the numerous reprints produced since the 1980s have made available to readers around the world fictional texts previously known only to the bibliographers listed above.6Major studies of printing technology began with the work of T. H. Tsien ??? (1909-2015), in particular his contribution to the ongoing history of science and technology begun by Joseph Needham (19001995).7 Chinese woodblock artist and scholar Zhou Wu ... (1921-1990) produced path-breaking studies of printers and illustrators of vernacular fiction; this work was significantly augmented by the broader historical studies of book production centers by Lucille Chia, Cynthia J. Brokaw, and others.8 Ming-Qing printers who produced works of fiction have been exhaustively traced by Wang Qingyuan ??? and his collaborators. 9 Joseph McDermott has provided studies of book collectors and their libraries as well as of the appreciation shown to books through time.10 How works of fiction were read can now be gleaned through studies of prefaces and commentaries; in studies of the latter, David Rolston edited a collection of major premodern interpretive essays and has written a comprehensive introduction to fiction commentaries. 11 And Kai-wing Chow has produced an excellent study of print culture in general in his Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China and subsequent publications.12 Anne McLaren has worked tirelessly in interpreting various versions of story cycles, various adaptations, and their differing cultural implications.13Recent New DirectionsOver the last two decades scholarship on book history and print culture has taken significant strides toward exploring particular facets of the book that will better illuminate the general field. One such focus is on book illustrations, their production as well as their interpretation. This area has attracted specialists from a variety of disciplines: historians, students of literature and theater, critical bibliographers, and art historians as well.14 Zhou Wu was a leader in this effort.A raft of new publications and doctoral dissertations address the interpretation of texts by examining their paratextual materials, prefaces, commentaries, and printed formats as well. …