“Good Stuff for Ridiculing”: Manuscripts of a Prosimetric Vernacular Text attributed to Pu Songling

• In Event: Vernacular Textual Culture in Ming and Qing China

Abstract

The highly diverse literary oeuvre of Pu Songling includes a considerable corpus of vernacular texts of various types, some of which have been attributed to this author only tentatively. What is particularly striking is the large number of extant manuscripts for many of these vernacular texts, for the larger part preserved in an archive in Japan. Serious philological engagement with this vernacular part of Pu’s oeuvre began all along with modern Pu Songling philology, right from the 1920s, as scholars like Lu Dahuang, Ma Lixun, Liu Jieping and Guan Dedong produced editions of such texts, though these were based only on a thin material basis of individual manuscripts. Since then, unfortunately, scholarly interest in these texts has faded, despite the undeniable fact that they deserve to be read and studied in their own right. The present paper discusses the example of one such text, Xuejiu zichao (A school-master ridicules himself), attributable to Pu with some certainty. It seeks to demonstrate what can be gained from a systematic approach to this prosimetric vernacular text, taking into consideration the full scope of known manuscripts that carry versions of it. Besides studying the patterns of textual variation, it also draws on codicological information contained in the manuscripts, such as the contiguities with other texts, that hold valuable clues about the text’s nature and transmission. Thus, the present paper makes a case for a serious philological engagement with this layer of China’s literary heritage.

Author

• Roland Altenburger, Julius Maximilian University of Wuerzburg