Bandits in Print: “The Water Margin” and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel By Scott W. Gregory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023, xii + 179 pp. $130.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper)

Scott Gregory's first book, Bandits in Print, makes the case that the material form of the traditional Chinese novel is fundamental to understanding its meaning and social significance.In this, it contributes to a growing body of scholarship that argues that Chinese literary history must include consideration of the physical format of the books through which-or as which-literature developed.Although the foundational modern studies of the traditional Chinese novel largely understood literary works as abstractable from their printed formats, more recent scholarship has insisted on the importance of aspects of the printed format of the traditional novel such as illustrations or commentary. 1 By focusing on a single feature of printed novels, the first generation of print-aware studies traced developments over time that were overlooked by standard rubrics of literary studies more attuned to genre, theme, or literary techniques.Both sorts of study left intact, however, the general sense that various editions are versions of a single work.When David Rolston identifies the commentary editions as a "re-creation, or even appropriation" of an original work, rather than its "supplement" (Traditional Chinese Fiction, 70), he attributes creative agency to commentators rather than authors.Since the modern study of the traditional Chinese novel developed with reference to the dominance of the novel genre in the modern West, the commentarial tradition was a crucial step toward understanding the development of longform Chinese fiction on its own terms.(And, as Gregory points out, much modern scholarship on Chinese narrative is indebted to traditional commentators).If earlier work decentered the purported authors of fictional texts, Gregory decenters the commentator as well, to argue that, in part because it did not have a very strong