Content area
Full Text
Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China. Edited by Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-Wing Chow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xvi, 539 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-520-23126-9.
This striking volume does much to open late imperial China to the history of the book. It might come as a surprise to Western scholars that, in spite of the undeniable importance of books in Chinese society and culture, its book history has remained largely unexplored. The eleven essays in this volume aim to correct that oversight and to set a course for future studies of the late Ming and Qing. This period, roughly from the mid-sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, has long proved to be fertile ground for Western fields of inquiry into book production and readership, and, indeed, the insights gleaned from these Western approaches to book history make this volume even more accessible to scholars of both cultures. There is also an undeniable feeling of collegiality to the volume, which is perhaps unsurprising, given its origins in a 1998 conference. However, what sets it apart from other such collections is the extent to which each essay references the other. Not only is the resulting dialogue most helpful in gaining fresh insights into current scholarly debate, but the cross-referencing also neatly parallels the often overlapping paratextual commentaries found in many of the texts under discussion. Readers could ask for no better way of initiating themselves in Chinese book culture.
The first of the two introductory essays offers a concise and, frankly, indispensable introduction to the Chinese book. Cynthia J. Brokaw begins by addressing the need for a more holistic, Annales school approach, and, while acknowledging her debt to Western scholarship, she also recognizes the fundamental differences between Chinese and European book cultures (7). The most obvious of these distinctions concerns the...