《The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytelling》

An oral tradition still surviving in parts of China is that of professional storytelling, and one of the most flourishing localities for this art is the town of Yangzhou, in the lowest Yangze River area. Here, the art goes back to the late Ming period and comprises orally transmitted themes also found in the great Chinese novels from this time: "Water Margin", "Three Kingdoms" and more. The special demands of the acting and telling technique has led the Yangzhou storytellers to modify their local dialect. This investigation analyzes the resulting verbal tradition, "Yangzhou pinghua", from the viewpoints of phonology, grammar, style and narration, one aim being to reveal correlations between these four levels of analysis. The approach is interdisciplinary, combining methods from the linguistic and literary domains. A significant portion of the book comprises stories in the original with English translations.