Abstract
A cycle of vernacular stories named Doupeng xianhua (Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor, ca. 1660s) hitherto has been appreciated mainly as a literary device — that is, for its frame-narrative as a feature of bean arbor storytelling. This article, however, takes its setting seriously at the representational level and explores the text as an illuminating document of social communication among rural commoners. It argues that such informal storytelling in a public venue, such as a bean arbor, was a custom of rural Jiangnan that, due to its ephemerality, has left only few traces in the written tradition. Idle Talk's unidentified author is likely to have attended such storytelling meetings and derived inspiration from them. From the detailed representation in the frame-narrative of Idle Talk, we gain unique insights into a narrative community with its goals of ethical education, the mediation of tensions in village society, intergenerational communication of knowledge and experience as packaged in stories, and the continuous negotiation of the community's ethos and aesthetics. Far from representing a purely oral culture of communication, Idle Talk's storytelling practice betrays various touch-points with print media.
Keywords
Doupeng xianhua, Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor, informal amateur storytelling, bean arbor, gourd trellis, social communication, village society, narrative community
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