Popular Culture in Late Imperial China

One of the principal purposes of this book is to help bring the study of non-elite culture into the mainstream of academic discourse about traditional China. No one believes that we can understand China by studying only the privileged and the educated. But they produced most of the documents, and so they have received, and still receive, attention from historians far out of proportion to their numbers. This overemphasis on the elite has led to grave distortions in our vision of Chinese history and culture, distortions that can only be remedied by serious systematic study of the world beyond the boundaries of the ruling class.... We have tried in this book to concentrate on topics of special importance to the study of Chinese popular culture, and to come to grips with some of the major conceptual problems that arose in the course of research, writing, and discussion.