Green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel

Margaret B. Wan is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Utah.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgmetns1. Green Peony and the Martial Romance2. Formation of a Formula3. Parody and Roles in Green Peony4. Metafiction in Green Peony5. Placing the "Popular" Novel in the QingAppendix Notes Glossary Selected BibliographyIndex

"Treating a relatively ignored group of novels and its relation to performance-related literature, this monograph is an original and path-breaking contribution to the scholarship on later-imperial vernacular literature." — Chinoperl"[Wan's] meticulous efforts give us illuminating readings of some little-studied novels, shed light on an important stage in the development of narrative on martial themes, and, perhaps most important of all, elaborate our understanding of the formal, thematic, and social fabrics of narrative practice in late imperial China." — T'oung Pao"…Wan's book is a very welcome addition to the growing corpus of studies of the final century of Chinese late-imperial literature. Its careful research covers areas of popular literature and manuscript culture that are often overlooked in studies that deal solely with published (and easily available) editions of texts." — Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews"…Wan has written the first monographic study of martial art–type fiction as a literary genre … Drawing on little-known and hard-to-access martial arts novels and using sophisticated theoretical frameworks drawn from Bakhtin (The Dialogical Imagination, 1975) and scholars of metafiction, Wan offers us a wealth of insights into the interaction between the oral and dramatic arts and their textual derivatives, and offers a new way of understanding the interaction between 'folk' and 'literati' narratives in the case of Chinese fiction." — Asian Ethnology"…illuminating and surprising … Wan pinpoints a convergence between 'popular' and 'elite' fiction. This is an important and significant insight into the history of Chinese narrative, especially in the late Qing period, so the book deserves the attention of anyone interested in the popular culture of that time period." — CHOICE