This work explores significant physical aspects of the printed book
in late imperial China to reconstruct the changing assumptions with
which Chinese popular novels were originally read from the
sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the
previously neglected areas of book format, varieties of
illustrations and their significance, and the theory and practice
of reading illustrated narratives.
The author first considers the physical book itself, as a
vehicle for reading and as an object for visual enjoyment, tracing
the development of the format commonly used for popular reading
materials, the blockprinted book in sewn volumes with
illustrations. He describes the technological progress that made
book production efficient and economical by the middle of the
sixteenth century, and makes extensive comparisons between the
physical characteristics of novels and books of more artistically
refined content.
The focus of the study then shifts to the illustrations that
accompanied virtually all printed materials during the period when
popular fiction became common. They are found to consist of a range
of conventional elements that are related to images in more refined
arts, such as the paintings of the literati and the decorations
produced by commercial artists. Close parallels in both content and
pictorial motifs between these various levels of painting and book
illustrations suggest a continuum of the arts on which the pictures
in mass-produced fiction initially held a respectable position.
The final chapters assert, from a theoretical perspective, the
function of illustrations in narratives as a guide or a hindrance
to reading. The author demonstrates the correspondencebetween the
later decline of fiction illustrations and the growth in reading
audiences, explaining this connection as a function of flagging
interest in pictures -- which often interfere with, rather than
promote, the visualization so essential to reading for pleasure in
other cultures as well.
Throughout, the author incorporates findings from the history of
technology, new explorations in the development of commerce in
cultural objects, recent research on the commercial arts, and the
latest theories of reading for pleasure to situate -- and explain
-- the numerous changes in popular literary trends during the last
several centuries of imperial Chinese rule.
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