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Bandits in Print: The Water Margin and the Transformations cfthe Chinese Novel, by Scott W. Gregory. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2023. Pp. 192. $26.95 (paperback); $125.00 (hardcover); open access (ebook).
The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan henceforth abbreviated as Shuihu), likely the first vernacular novel of China, over the course of its reception history, has acquired sharply diverging meanings for different segments of readership. Moreover, it is a valid claim that Scott Gregory puts forward in his Bandits in Print, that it was its repackaging as a book, in widely varying editions, which crucially shaped and reshaped this text, with a focus on certain groups of target readers. Consequently, he argues that Shuihu is best understood as "a print phenomenon." This text, with its weak sense of authorship, may indeed have been particularly attractive to editors and publishers for its formability and adaptability to their ideas about it and to the expectations from readers.
The process of this novel's genesis has hitherto remained largely in the dark, though the importance of oral storytelling for the development of the story cycles has been much emphasized. Gregory tends to downplay these contributions to the text's formation before it was shaped into a novel. While he cannot lift the veil of mystery over the process of novelistic creation, either, he can indeed add substance to the phantoms of two unpreserved 100-chapter print editions that can be traced to the first half of the sixteenth century. We know about their existence only indirectly, from mentions and listings. It has puzzled scholars that both of them emerged from centers of political power. The man behind one edition, Guo Xun (1475-1542), the Marquis of Wuding, was close to the Jiajing ... emperor (r. 1521-67) whose side he took in the Great Rites Controversy; while the other edition was issued by the Censorate, a powerful central agency of the Ming government, personified by censor-in-chief Wang Tingxiang ... (1474-1544). Is it conceivable that such eminent personages considered the Shuihu bandit saga an appropriate text of which to produce their own editions for exclusive circulation, regardless of its rebellious content?
Gregory, in the first two chapters of his book, solves this conundrum in a convincing manner,...
