Green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel
version reveals that this was 1 of a number of details that was "corrected" for court performance. Every bit noted above, the last two plays are both attributed to Guan Hanqing and focus on the members of the Peach Orchard Alliance late in their lives. In both plays, the fleeting nature of life and heroic action is a major theme. Idema and W also note a number of structural similarities that cause them to speculate that perhaps the ii plays were written as a pair (p. 236). The Slap-up Male monarch Guan and the Single Sword Meeting (Guan dawang dandao hui 關大王單刀會) recounts an incident towards the end of Guan Yu's life when he attends a banquet hosted by officials of the Kingdom of Wu and thwarts an attempt to coerce him into returning the city of Jingzhou, which the Shu-Han forces had "borrowed" later on the battle of Red Cliff. The play is extant in both a Yuan edition and a Maiwang Studio Drove manuscript version—both are translated in their entirety in this book. Dissimilar the previous two plays discussed, the last play in the anthology, In a Dream Guan and Zhang, A Pair, Blitz to Western Shu (Guan Zhang shuang fu Xishu meng 關張雙赴西蜀夢), is only extant in a Yuan edition. The play conflates the deaths of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, and in the first two acts portrays Liu Bei'south reaction to the news through the mouths of offset, a messenger, and then, Zhuge Liang. The last ii acts depict a visit paid by the ghosts of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei to the dreaming Liu Bei. While Guan Yu was the lead vocalizer in the final two acts of Single Sword Meeting, Zhang Fei is assigned that part in the final two acts of this play. The resultant focus on Zhang Fei makes the play unique among depictions of the end of the brotherhood. Idema and West point out that the revenge that Zhang Fei demands from Liu Bei prioritizes their personal bail over the needs of their common enterprise, and volition doom the latter (pp. 298–99). Another theme of the play is vanitas, powerfully evoked past the arias of the in one case bold and unruly Zhang Fei equally he remembers the glorious deeds performed by the iii brothers in their prime, and discovers his limits equally a ghost. The translations in Battles, Betrayals, and Brotherhood are, as is typical of Idema and Westward'due south work, colloquial and lively while simultaneously meticulously researched. This volume is a welcome addition to our resource on early on drama and the Three Kingdoms story cycle akin, and will no doubt go along to inspire lively class discussions and productive research for some time to come. KIMBERLY A. BESIO Colby College Dark-green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel. By Margaret B. Wan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. xii þ 235 pp. 15 illus. Material $70.00. Paper $24.95. Electronic $24.95. Modern histories of traditional Chinese colloquial fiction pay hardly any attending to the late eighteenth-century novel, Green Peony (Lü mudan 綠牡旦), even though it was i of the most pop novels of the concluding century of the Qing dynasty if we judge past the number of known nineteenth-century editions. The monograph nether review is therefore long overdue. Margaret B. Wan'southward volume-length study is much more than, however, than the analysis of a unmarried novel. The championship promises us an inquiry into the novel'southward link to the ascension of martial arts fiction, simply that is not its main Volume Reviews 61 emphasis. Rather, the author treats Dark-green Peony as the prime case of the genre of "martial romance" (a term coined by herself) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that tin be considered a forerunner of the afterward total-fledged martial arts fiction. At the same time, she is very much concerned with the origins of the martial romance in the performance literature (or at least the performancerelated literature) of the second role of the eighteenth century. This is considering, as she shows, both Dark-green Peony and The Picture of Tianbao (Tianbao tu 天豹圖), however another early example of the martial romance...
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