From Folk Opera to the Printed Book in Early Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

This study examines a genre of printed song booklets on romantic themes that were extremely popular in urban coastal China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In China, vernacular texts were traditionally printed using wood blocks (xylography). However, by the early twentieth century, publishers increasingly adopted Western forms of lithographic technology. Modern ideas were imported as well. The focus of this study will be on dramatic texts based on a form of folk opera that circulated in Shanghai and the hinterland. A common theme of folk opera texts were scandals and topical events of the era. These stories were often based on those in popular circulation in folk perform..