Tanci, a form of storytelling accompanied by stringed instruments, is a traditional art that is popular in southern China.

 

Popular works of fiction, local operas, poetic dramas, legends, folk songs and ballads are all familiar literary and artistic forms that are considered works of popular literature. Regarded as living fossils of traditional folk life, this literary form in China offers rich materials for studying Chinese literature, art, culture, history, language and customs. Drum songs of the North and Tanci of the South are all good examples in this case. However, literature related to this living fossil is in urgent need of compilation and preservation.

 
Research border
China has a long tradition of popular literature that originated from pre-Qin times and flourished after the Qing Dynasty (1616-1911). In contrast to what some would term “high-brow” literature, popular literature contains fewer ambitious themes, thus was long neglected as a literary form.

There have been consistent efforts to aid its development. For example, Zheng Zhenduo wrote A History of Chinese Popular Literature in the 1930s, and Wu Tongtui, Wang Wenbao and Duan Baolin co-authored Outline of Chinese Popular Literature in the 1990s. Still, the boundaries of the discipline have not been confirmed.

Huang Shizhong, dean of the Institute of Chinese Classics at Sun Yat-sen University, said that studies of popular literature face problems in the contemporary disciplinary system because they fall in a gray area. Popular literature has long been affiliated with ancient and modern forms and denied a place in the contemporary canon. It could be included in folk literature, but scholars in this field regard their research subject as primarily focused on folklore that is spread orally. This is why, with the exception of ancient operas and literature, popular literature received little attention.

Although it is difficult for popular literature to gain traction, its academic value has been acknowledged. Influenced by modern Western literary concepts, research on Chinese popular literature reached a peak in the early 20th century, and developed further around the 1950s. The second peak appeared with the import of such concepts as the Great tradition and the Small Tradition” in the 1980s and 1990s.
 
Collection
Attempts to collect related literature preceded research in this area. After a prolonged period of study, research projects, such as The Catalogue of Chinese Operas and The Catalogue of Chinese Folk Artistic Forms categorized basic literary forms of popular literature. However, only a few genres like Zidishu poems were included, and more efforts should be put into examining other literary forms.

Huang said that literary documents from the late Qing Dynasty to the early years of the Republican Era were mainly collected and preserved by fans of these works, which meant that they could not be found in libraries. Documents of this category suffered the most damage.

Today, although the preservation of these documents has improved, because they are collected as a form of local literature, this is often in a manner that is not systematic and does not have a centralized index. This means they are not easily accessible to researchers. Moreover, a large number of block-printed books, manuscripts and mimeos have been kept in the reference rooms of the artistic research institutes affiliated with local culture sectors. These research materials need to be compiled for better preservation.

Chen Shulu, a professor from the School of Liberal Arts at Nanjing University, has suggested that there should be a concerted attempt to investigate and collect popular literature through a combination of fieldwork and literature arrangements. Chen is leading a major research project, Research on Folklore from the Qing Dynasty to the Republican China Era and Database Construction supported by the National Social Science Fund of China.

 
Protection
In the last century, many scholars have made tremendous contributions to popular literature arrangements and bibliography compilations, such as Collected Chinese Folk Songs by Liu Fu and Li Jiarui, Collected Poems of Zidishu and Collection of Traditional Artistic Forms of Beijing by Fu Xihua. Most of this literature was finished before the 1990s, and needs further additions and improvement.

The project Compilation of Chinese Literature proposed by scholars at Sun Yat-sen University has gained supported from domestic and overseas researchers in this field. In addition, Zhu Wanshu, a professor from Renmin University of China, suggested that proponents of popular literature should publish book series and issue academic journals on their own.

 

 

 

Huo Wenqi is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.