Bandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel

Synopsis

Bandits in Print examines the world of print in early modern China, focusing on the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan). Depending on which edition a reader happened upon, The Water Margin could offer vastly different experiences, a characteristic of the early modern Chinese novel genre and the shifting print culture of the era.Scott W. Gregory argues that the traditional novel is best understood as a phenomenon of print. He traces the ways in which this particularly influential novel was adapted and altered in the early modern era as it crossed the boundaries of elite and popular, private and commercial, and civil and martial. Moving away from ultimately unanswerable questions about authorship and urtext, Gregory turns instead to the editor-publishers who shaped the novel by crafting their own print editions. By examining the novel in its various incarnations, Bandits in Print shows that print is not only a stabilizing force on literary texts; in particular circumstances and with particular genres, the print medium can be an agent of textual change.

Copyright:

2023

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

192 Pages

ISBN-13:

9781501769207

Related ISBNs:

9781501769191, 9781501769689, 9781501769214

Publisher:

Cornell University Press

Date of Addition:

01/23/24

Copyrighted By:

Cornell University, The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts

Grade Levels:

Graduate Student

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.