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Plum and Bamboo: China's Suzhou Chantefable Tradition. By MARK BENDER. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xiii, 259 pp. $44.95 (cloth).
Plum and Bamboo: China's Suzhou Chantefable Tradition is an engagingly written account of chantefable (tanct) storytelling in Suzhou from the late imperial period (ca. late eighteenth century) to the present day. Based on fieldwork that stretched over a year, Mark Bender's study seeks to convey how Suzhou tanci are performed while making good use of written sources as well as performers' accounts and personal observations of the story-telling art. It is one of a very few studies in Western languages of storytelling and of a literature performed in dialect.
Each of its three lengthy chapters are headed by an "opening ballad" (kaipian) in the manner of a story-telling session. "Introducing Suzhou Chantefable" gives an overview of storytelling in the Suzhou region, both straight storytelling (pingtan) performed by a single artist and chantefable stories typically performed by a pair of artists. "Opening Oral Territory in Suzhou Chantefable," the heart of the book, focuses on "the strategies, principles, and goals with which Suzhou storytellers concern themselves when performing their stories" (p. 68). "Performing: Two Women Marry" is a translated transcript of a fifty-minute live performance of a representative episode from a popular story, with Bender's commentary on the performance as well as...