The volume under review contains interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies of various genres of the performing arts, based on analyses of textual representations of these arts. Vibeke Børdahl, the organizer of the 2007 symposium in Oslo where these papers were first presented, has dedicated many years to the study of traditional oral performances in contemporary China. One of her greatest contributions to this field is her role as project leader (with Fei Li as co-leader) of the video recording of 360 hours of storytelling by four master performers from Yangzhou. Given the rapid disappearance of many forms of traditional popular culture, one must applaud dedicated efforts to preserve expressions of popular culture for posterity. Similar efforts undertaken in the past have made the studies presently gathered in this volume possible.

The Interplay of the Oral and the Written in Chinese Popular Literature consists of an introduction, six chapters, a bibliography, and an index. In the introduction, the editors provide an informative discussion of existing studies on the interplay between oral and written traditions. In the first chapter, André Lévy proposes to reexamine the classic novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) in terms of oral provenance. He argues that a reexamination of the novel through its relationship to storytelling would eliminate many of the controversies that surround the novel, such as debates about its authorship and criticisms of its weak structure. Lianyan Ge's contribution to the volume reads like a sophisticated piece of detective work, as the author attempts to establish the oral provenance of another classic novel, Shuihu zhuan (Water Margin). In her analysis of that novel, she finds narrative affinities with two other genres of literature: eight cihua (chantefables) about Judge Bao, composed in the fifteenth century and rediscovered in Shanghai in 1967, and early Yuan gong'an (detective stories), related in topic to the cihua. Although he demonstrates an impressive number of similarities between these two genres and the Shuihu zhuan, and although he even provides internal evidence of Song provenance in the cihua, Ge is mindful that the recurrent themes may have resulted from written simulations of storytelling techniques rather than from actual oral derivation (p. 31). He therefore ultimately proposes that the works draw on a common storehouse of conventions, themes, and motifs, rather than assuming that he has proven the oral provenance of the novel.

Margaret Wan, in her essay, reconstructs the audiences and reading practices of Qing dynasty guci (drum ballads), a genre that was immensely popular in North China yet has received little scholarly attention. Based on an analysis of internal evidence in nine printed guci, Wan concludes that the readers of these texts, while local, “ran the gamut of society,” and that the texts themselves suggest “a range of reading practices” and “knowledge of performance, and of audiences” (p. 79). Vibeke Børdahl's chapter analyzes the use of stock phrases, specifically pre-verse tags and tags for dialogues, in printed versions and oral performances of the popular tale “Wu Song Fights the Tiger.” Bøhrdahl places this analysis of “Wu Song” within a broader quantitative study of the use of similar markers in novels, dramas, chantefables, and oral performances from the Yuan to the present. Her most notable conclusion is the unexpected discovery that the stock phrases used in novels to simulate storytelling are particular to novels, and are not found in the genre of storytelling whence they purportedly derived. This provides additional warning against the assumption that the use of stock phrases is proof of oral provenance.

In the fifth chapter, Anne McLaren compares two records of a folk epic narrative shan'ge (mountain song) from the lower Yangzi delta region: a nineteenth-century printed version and a composite version compiled by a contemporary Chinese ethnologist, based on performances by a master practitioner. These long verse narratives represent a significant discovery in the oral performing arts. McLaren draws attention to vestiges of local customs such as sororate marriage and, more importantly, demonstrates that the bowdlerization in the contemporary version has transformed an erotic and salacious narrative into a politically correct and “healthy” tale. In my own research I have encountered similar transformations of traditional popular narratives in contemporary performance. In the final chapter, Boris Riftin analyzes the depiction of oral performances and of scenes from popular narratives in the prints known as nianhua (New Year prints). In his large sample of prints (including collections held in Germany, Austria, and Russia), Riftin finds a wide array of novels, drama, and other performing arts, amalgamated in the imagination of the nianhua artists.

Although the variety of its chapters deprives The Interplay of the Oral and the Written of thematic coherence, the volume represents a significant contribution to the scholarship of the Chinese performing arts. All the articles demonstrate solid, meticulous scholarship and employ innovative approaches to understudied genres and neglected topics, and they either continue debates about acknowledged vernacular classics or broaden our perspective on traditional popular culture.