Home and the World: Editing the "Glorious Ming" in Woodblock Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(ProQuest: denotes non USASCII text omitted.)Home and the World: Editing the "Glorious Ming" in Woodblock Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Yuming He. Harvard Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 82. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Pp. xiv 343. $39.95 (cloth).Over the last few decades, the field of Chinese book culture has produced an unprecedented amount of excellent research, such as Robert Hegel's groundbreaking book on fiction illustrations, Lucille Chia's rigorous study of commercial printing in Fujian, and Michela Bussotti's specialized investigation of Anhui prints. Yuming He's monograph examines a range of new materials and takes the study of Chinese book culture to a new level of sophistication. She recovers a variety of imprints popular during the late Ming but largely unknown today, including books of drinking games and jokes, drama miscellanies, and daily use encyclopedias. Through nuanced and insightful analysis of the material and textual features of those books, Yuming He retraces their production and circulation in the historical, socio economic, intellectual, and symbolic contexts of the late Ming, and in doing so greatly enhances our understanding of the central role of books in shaping social identities and social performance of the Ming audience in a fashion conscious and pleasure seeking urban milieu.In the Introduction, He notes that the Qing elite held a pejorative attitude toward Ming popular texts, often condemning them as "hucksterish" (baifan and "worthless" (1 2) However, what the Qing readers found "slipshod, irresponsible, or even heretical" might have attracted the Ming readers as "irreverent wit, exuberant imagination, [and] clever parody" (5) The sharp contrast leads He naturally to her central questions: How and why was it that such books, with their alleged flaws, "nonetheless held value for Ming readers?" (141) What roles did those books play in the culture of the late Ming?Yuming He begins by observing that these books derived values from their connection to a social world of fashion and entertainment. The imprints are characterized by clusters of texts and images that were open and fluid, being embedded in "a protean web" of visual and written materials that were always subject to change and appropriation (9) To study this culture of "promiscuous reprinting, recompilation, and recycling," she adopts a notion of "book conversancy," which goes beyond the dichotomy between form and content and examines the combined effects of texts, images, and physical features of the book to illustrate the multiple ways in which books might be read, used, and appropriated by historical readers (7).Chapter One deals with Pearls to Evoke Laughter (Boxiao zhuji a book that weaves together a range of canonical texts but subjects them to witty and playful uses, such as in drinking games and jokes. Juxtaposing citations from disparate genres and registers of style, the book celebrates the player of subversive wit, who has "the ability to switch between and stitch together" elegant, scholarly, folksy and even "vulgar" modes of speech and fields of knowledge (43) Yuming He aptly demonstrates the appeal of Boxiao zhuji through her nuanced reading of a selection of riddles and games. As she further explains, skillful playing of such games required particular cultural knowledge from its users. Texts that provided that cultural knowledge include basic primers such as Poems by A Thousand Masters (Qian jia shi classical texts for the examination system (such as the Analects) and even the Great Ming Code (Da Ming lu This chapter also includes an investigation of True Treasures of Ancient Style Writing (Guwen zhenbao as an immensely popular primer from which people extracted texts for playful purposes. In her discussion of those texts He gives intriguing examples to illustrate the blending of classical language and common speech and the hilarious effect generated.