Selling Scandal in the Republican Era: Folk Opera in Performance and Print

Abstract

The publication of vernacular texts in regional languages is a vibrant but relatively little-known niche in the history of Chinese print culture. This study will draw from extant opera texts (tanhuang) produced in Shanghai for Wu-speaking audiences and readers in the Republican era. In the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, tanhuang performances were regularly proscribed by local authorities because of their erotic and scandalous content. By the early twentieth century publishers attempted to adapt traditional tanhuang material to keep up with radical changes in society and to avoid prohibition. The term “reformed” (gailiang) appeared in story titles to signify new notions of modernity. Considered ephemeral reading in their day, very few tanhuang booklets remain in mainland China. This study will take advantage of the rich corpus preserved in the Fu Ssu-nien Library in Taibei’s Academia Sinica to investigate tanhuang texts published in 1920s Shanghai. The intention is to examine the strategies of authors and publishers in the adaptation of this conventional folk genre. A particular focus will be the clash between the traditional corpus and new notions of gender equality.