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Chloë F. Starr, Red-light Novels of the late Qing, Brill Publishing, 2007. 293 pgs.
This book should be recognised as a significant academic achievement. It is the result of many years of research, which began as far back as the 1990s as a DPhil thesis entitled The Late Qing Courtesan Novel as Text and Fiction andwas published as a monograph in 2007 at a time when Chloë F. Starr was working as a Departmental Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford. Two years later Starr began teaching at the Yale Divinity School where she is currently Professor of Asian Christianity and Theology. It would appear from Starr’s curriculum vitae that she has left the study of courtesan fiction far behind her. Starr wrote two or three essays and book chapters on related subjects that were published around the same time as this book, and these, together with this impressive volume, stand out proudly in her output as representing a valuable foray into the still much-understudied area of nineteenth-century Chinese “courtesan fiction”.
The original title of Starr’s DPhil thesis left no room for doubt as to the focus of her study, but sometime during the process of revising it for publication, Starr seems to have felt the need to change its title to Red-light Novels of the late Qing. The reason given for this change is not entirely convincing, but the choice was not Starr’s alone. Apparently, the term “red light” was suggested to her by the late, great Glen Dudbridge (1938–2017), then Shaw Professor at the University of Oxford (p. 20 n.49). The thinking behind this was that the adopted term “red light” would serve the function of tying the literature “to the brothel locus” while avoiding “the gendered aspect” implied by the term “courtesan novel” (p. 20). This gendered aspect was deemed inappropriate, as the earliest of the works of fiction Starr chose to focus on in her book, Pinhua baojian (Precious mirror of ranked flowers) is concerned with homosexual romantic encounters, rather than exchanges between female courtesans and their clients. Despite Dudbridge’s well-intentioned suggestion, the term “red light” must be seen as entirely anachronistic. The term as we know it today is used specifically in the West to refer to urban areas in which brothels are located, “red-light districts”. This term does indeed stretch back to the late nineteenth-century, but it has no place in Chinese culture. After a brief perusal of the Shanghai English-language newspapers (using electronic resources that were unavailable to Dudbridge or Starr at the time of her research) it is clear that the term had little, or no usage in China before the 1930s.
Starr’s study focuses on six novels published between the years 1840 and 1910.[1] They are (using Starr’s English translations): Pinhua baojian, Qinglou meng (Dream of green chambers), Huayue hen (Traces of flowers and the moon), Fengyue meng (Dream of wind and moon/Dream of romantic illusions), Haishang hua liezhuan (Ranked biographies of Shanghai flowers), and Jiuweigui (Nine-tailed turtle). All of these have been well-known in the field of nineteenth-century Chinese literary studies for many decades, but the reasons for Starr’s choices are clear. With these well-known books Starr was able to fully engage with ongoing intellectual debates and discussions, and by doing so make her own specific and valuable contribution to existing academic dialogue. One can’t help thinking, however, that it might have been beneficial to the field if she had introduced one or two books that are not quite so well-known, as this may have served to broaden the scope of academic debate.
In China, the type of novel explored in the book has been most widely known by the generic name given to it by Lu Xun (1881–1936) in his Brief History of Chinese Fiction of 1925, xiaxie 狹邪 (literally: xia 狹 narrow; xie 邪 unhealthy influence).[2] This term originally referred to narrow, winding residential lanes, and often more specifically to the lanes in which prostitutes ply their trade, and according to Starr, the term has the additional implied meanings of “wayward” or “lewd” (p. xxv). Lu Xun’s use of the term xiaxie xiaoshuo has been variously translated into English as “depravity fiction” (David Der-wei Wang) and “novels about prostitution” (p. 19n46), but is most widely referred to as “courtesan fiction” today (p. 4). The term “courtesan fiction” serves the purpose of encompassing all books on courtesan themes, while managing to avoid unhelpful judgments as to the nature of the courtesans’ profession.
Starr is sure to show that “courtesan fiction” should not be seen as a distinct genre or category. Such categorisations have arisen largely for the convenience of scholars, but the affixing of labels “has affected the way new editions have been packaged and received” (p. 4). The term xiaxie xiaoshuo has been widely adopted in Chinese scholarship due to Lu Xun’s elevated status in the history of Chinese letters. In English-language research we are in the fortunate position whereby we can bypass what seems to have become a rather derogatory term (xiaxie), and instead settle on the far more neutral appellation, “courtesan fiction”.
The book is formed of a preface and four chapters. In Starr’s words, Chapter One “presents an overview of fiction in the late Qing, of the antecedents to red-light novels, and of the cultural status of the texts in the Qing” (p. xxiii). The three chapters that follow are each concerned with “an aspect of narrative”. Chapter Four then brings together the two central themes of the volume, narrative and text, while significantly broadening the scope to include an interesting discussion about the publishing world and print media of the time (p. xxv). Starr informs the reader that her study “is not primarily interested in defining the literary excellence or otherwise” of xiaxie novels (pp. xxv-xxvi). With regard to previous Western scholarship and the relative lack of focus on narrative and text, Starr emphasises that “most twentieth-century literary critics have kept a wary distance from the text of these novels, neither commenting on the beauty of textual form nor exploring the intricacies of narrative style within” (p. 4). Even more fundamentally, in China, this type of fiction in the past has been “derided by literary critics…or banned by censors on grounds of moral health” (p. xxi). Starr is very specific about her own goals in writing this book. It is very much “a study of fiction” and “looks at the mechanics of the narratives, and only at the figures of courtesan and client as refracted in that narrative” (p. xiv). So, the focus of this important study is almost exclusively on the textual and narrative matters found within the chosen texts. With regard to these themes, Starr observes that in academia “serious efforts to integrate textual and narrative studies have yet to take hold”, and she specifically sees the aim of her research as an attempt to make such an integration (p. xxvi). Furthermore, as Starr rightly claims, “relatively few works have sought to link research on aspects of book production to the literary or historical content of those texts” (p. 55). It is with book production that the final chapter of her study is most concerned. Every scholar and critic has their preferred way to approach a subject, and will always focus first and foremost on what interests them most. For this reviewer it is this discussion about book production in the final chapter that is by far the most engaging. With much of the material in earlier chapters the focus is on the outlining of narrative plots, and there is a certain lack of variety in approach, a tendency that is no doubt seen by the author as nothing less than a necessarily thorough analysis of the material. When the author speaks more generally, for example with regard to the periodical press and serial publication, some of the arguments previously explored are given the opportunity to really come to life. As discussed by Starr, “many of the technological advances that fuelled [a surge in print production in Shanghai] were developed within the newsprint industry” (p. 62). Something that might have been worth addressing with regard to the print media and newspaper industry in Shanghai, is the importance of literary figures such as Yuan Zuzhi (grandson of the poet Yuan Mei (1716-1798)). By the 1870s Yuan Zuzhi (1827-1898) was a major figure in the publishing world, and the literati circles of Shanghai, while at the same time being fully immersed in courtesan culture. He even appeared as a satirical character in at least two examples of popular Shanghai-based fiction, due to his fame as a poet and publisher, and his close personal involvement as a client with famous courtesans in Shanghai.[3] Such contextualisation points to the full integration of some elite literati figures into a flourishing courtesan culture. The appearance of their poetry as regular features in Shanghai newspapers—some of which was on courtesan themes—shows that courtesan literature and poetry was not simply the preserve of those who had been unsuccessful in the civil service examinations, as it is often supposed the authors of these novels had been.
As Starr explains at length, the books identified as belonging to the group on which both she and Lu Xun chose to focus, have their origins in three historical literary precedents: the Ming short stories of Feng Menglong (1574-1646), caizi jiaren (scholar and beauty) romances, and the great eighteenth-century novel of manners by Cao Xueqin (1710-1765), Honglou meng (p. xxiii). This was of course true of many other forms of popular fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where the same influences can be seen, and again calls into question the merits of defining these books so explicitly as “courtesan novels” and thereby separating them from the wider corpus of popular literature to which they are so closely related.
This is not a book for the general reader and was never designed to be so. Consequently, there are large parts of it that would no doubt prove heavy going for anyone but the specialist reader already familiar with nineteenth-century popular Chinese literature. The book’s origins as a DPhil thesis accentuate the book’s specialist nature. Even if it might not be immediately appealing to the general reader, this should certainly not be seen as downside or a criticism. This is the innate nature of a niche book on a niche subject, and it was unashamedly written for a specialist readership.
For the most part, Starr’s translations of the book titles appear only once, at first mention, and thereafter she refers to them by their Chinese titles. Pinhua baojian is the only book for which Starr doesn’t provide her own translation, except in a short quotation from the book itself (p. 76). It is with translation in general that a missed opportunity can be identified. Out of the six books chosen by Starr, to this reviewer’s knowledge, only one, Haishang hua liezhuan has been translated into English (by Zhang Ailing (1920-1995), the manuscript having been found among her belongings after her death). With Starr’s profound understanding of courtesan fiction, acquired through the study of these six books, and the detailed textual analysis she has undertaken on them, it is a real pity she did not feel the urge to translate at least one of them into English. There are all too few works of fiction from this period available to the English reader, and Starr would have been providing a valuable service if she had taken the time to translate one. Of course, time is always a major consideration for an academic, and, in the end, Starr has chosen to devote her valuable time since writing her thesis and book to exploring a different academic path altogether. As a consequence, the Chinese works of popular fiction from this period available to the English-language reader remain few and far between.
As with all books in the China Studies series, Brill has produced an attractive and impressive volume, even if the brown colour chosen for the covers of all books in the series has become decidedly dated in appearance over the years. Red-light Novels of the late Qing was published as Volume 14 in the series. In the acknowledgements, Starr tells the story of her father Don Starr purchasing copies of the original books in the bookshops of Liulichang, Beijing, presumably during the early days of her DPhil research—happy days when Chinese antiquarian books were more readily available in China than they are today. In the 1990s, antiquarian books could still be found at affordable prices, though, as Starr tells her readers in another anecdote, they were not freely available to all and were often only for sale at the individual vendor’s discretion (p. xxii). Today their worldwide commercial value is too widely recognised to make it possible for the average student or enthusiast of Chinese literature to find original books at affordable prices. Many modern Chinese editions of the books are available, but as noted by Starr as a major part of the argument in Chapter Four, the experience of studying these books in modern editions, does not compare well with reading them in the original, as the prefaces and commentaries found in historical Chinese books—which do so much to enhance the reading experience—have so often been deleted or otherwise glossed over in modern editions.
Notes
[1] Starr explains that in her study the term “novel” is used only as a sort of shorthand to refer to the works of fiction (xiaoshuo 小説) in question and “does not imply that xiaoshuo can be assessed in terms of western novel theory” (p. 19n46).
[2] Lu Hsun [Lu Xun], A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1976). Lu Xun 魯迅, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe 中國小說史略 (Beijing: Beiyang, 1925).
[3] Qi Fanniu 戚飯牛 and Zhu Dagong 朱大公, Ma Yongzhen yanyi 馬永貞演義 (Ma Yongzhen—An Historical Romance) (Shanghai: Zhonghua tushu jicheng gongsi, 1923) and Wu Jianren 吳趼人 [Wu Woyao 吳沃堯], Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang 二十年目睹之怪現狀 (Strange Happenings Witnessed over a Period of Twenty Years), 8 juan (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1923).
How to cite: Bevan, Paul. “A Niche Book on a Niche Subject: Chloë F. Starr’s Red-light Novels of the late Qing.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 11 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/11/red-light.
Paul Bevan is a Sinologist, researcher, literary translator, and lecturer. From 2020 to 2023 he was Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and Retained Lecturer in Chinese at Wadham College. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He is currently an Associate Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies. His research focuses on popular fiction and the visual arts as they appeared in periodicals and magazines published in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He is also currently researching on guidebooks of nineteenth century Shanghai. Paul’s most recent book is a translation of The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Another translation, Murder in the Maloo: A Tale of Old Shanghai is with the publisher, and is in the final stages of preparation. He has written two monographs: A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938 (Brill, 2015), and Intoxicating Shanghai: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age (Brill, 2020). John A. Crespi’s review of the latter calls attention to the translations embedded in the book: “Featured within the book’s densely informative analyses are translations of four modernist short stories. [These] in themselves contribute significantly to modern Chinese literary studies…”.