Glen Dudbridge is a well-known British sinologist and for a number of years director of the Sinological Research Institute at Oxford, created with funds from the Sir Shaw Foundation of the University of Hong Kong. In addition, he is the editor of the monographic series "China Studies" published by the Institute. The seventh volume of this series, ¹ published to mark the completion of Mr. Dudbridge's teaching career, consists of his articles on China written between 1969 and 2005 and published in various periodicals and collections. All of them, therefore, are already known to the scientific community, and it is hardly necessary to evaluate each one separately now. The concept of the entire collection as a whole deserves attention.

The 14 articles are grouped into three sections: "Books and Publishing", "Medieval Prose and Religious Culture", and"Popular Culture". The texts were subjected to minimal editorial changes, mainly in order to unify the transcription. A general index has been added to all articles (they are called chapters), which makes it much easier to work with the book. There are also links to five monographs by G. Dudbridge ² (the articles were written during their preparation), so readers who want to get more detailed information on certain issues can easily do so. A separate list of sources used in the book is given.

The collection is compiled not on a chronological basis, but on a thematic basis. It opens with the latest article by G. Dudbridge, "A Thousand Years of Narrative Prose Printing in China", which has not yet been published anywhere at ^the time of publication of the reviewed book3. In it, the author summarizes his many years of reflection on the peculiarities of Chinese book culture and analyzes the peculiarities of printing literary works of various genres, starting with the invention of woodcut and ending with the publication of Lu Xin's writings.

Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005. 325 p., il. (China Studies. Published for the Institute for Chinese Studies University of Oxford. Vol. 7).

Dudbridge city. Books, short stories and popular culture: selected articles about China. Leiden-Boston: Bril, 2005. 325 p., ill. (Study of China. Ed. by the Institute of Sinological Research, Oxford University, vol. 7).

¹ Previous volumes: Berg D. Carnival in China. A Reading of the Xingshi Yanyuan Zhuan. 2002; Hochx M. Questions of Style. Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911 - 1837. 2003; Seiwert H. Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History. 2003; Heberer T. Private Entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam Social and Political Functioning of Strategic Groups. 2003; Xiang B. Transcending Boundaries. Zhejingcun: the Story of Migrant Village in Beijing. 2005; Huang N. Woman, War, Domesticity. Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s. 2005.

^{The Hsi-yu Chi: a Study of Antecedents in the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel. Cambridge,} 2 1970; The Tale of Li Wa: Study and Critical Edition of the Chinese Story from the Ninth Century. L., 1983; Religious Experience and Lay Society in Tang China: a Reading of Tai Fu's Kuang-i Chi. Cambridge, 1995; Lost Books from Medieval China. L., 2000; The Legend of Miaoshan (Revised). Oxford. 2004.

³ It was included in the collection published in 2006: Literary Cultures and the Material Book (L.: British Library Publications).

page 185

Of all the articles that make up the volume, one topic stands out, placed, as it seems, not quite successfully, in the third part. It is better to open or complete the entire edition with this text. This is Mr. Dudbridge's inaugural address, delivered on June 1, 1995, at the opening ceremony of the Cancer Research Institute. The director of the Institute formulates the tasks facing the new academic structure: studying China from the beginning of the 20th century through the prism of social sciences. Mr. Dudbridge has never studied the new China, sociology or political science, but being a widely erudite sinologist, he tries to predict the future of China as he sees it.

As a historian of classical literature, G. Dudbridge has the ability to explain any phenomenon of modern culture, starting from the most significant works. The social history of twentieth-century China he draws from the novel "Shui hu Zhuan "("River Backwaters") - the first work that captured the crisis of the national historian. The novel is credited with creating a standard model for the reform of Chinese society at all times, and it can also be considered as the basis of standard vernacular literature, which gave rise to a national literary language.

The end of the twentieth century, with the collapse of empires and the creation of new political and commercial alliances, has resulted in an increase in the number of regional voices advocating their "micro-identity," and the Chinese world is no exception. Sinologists of the newly created Institute should study the Chinese culture of each of its regional parts that already exist or are just beginning to be designated (mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Islamic Central Asia, Korea, Southeast Asia), adhering to the principle of "integrated but organic".

The first part of the book includes an article about the first printed editions of the 100-chapter version of the novel "Si Yu Ji "("Journey to the West"). Studying them, G. Dudbridge finds confirmation of his long-standing idea that Wu Chenen cannot be considered the author of the novel, as has been customary since the early 1920s.

The following article presents Mr. Dudbridge not so much as a specialist in textology, but as a deep expert on the technical side of Chinese printing. It compares two fragmentary woodcut editions of the Sho Fu compilation encyclopedia in 120 yuan, dating from the 17th century, from the Alexander Wiley collection, now stored in the Chinese Collection of the Bodleian Library in Oxford under codes 933 and 939.

The second part of the volume, consisting of six chapters, is devoted to the study of various aspects of Tang religious culture, as they are reflected in Tang texts. The first chapter is general in nature - the problems of studying Tang sources for the study of religious culture, the rest are considered in detail specific samples of ancient prose about miracles (Zhiguai) as the most important source of information about religious and social life. However, this information does not lie on the surface, it cannot simply be interpreted, the texts must be subjected to a deep critical reading. G. Dudbridge offers his own method of such reading, which consists in finding parallels with reliable historical sources when analyzing "anecdotes" about miracles. One chapter deals with the stories of the eighth century relating to Taoist cults, while the other reconstructs Buddhist concepts based on stories about Buddhist icons. The final chapters focus on two characters in Tang stories - Liu Yi and Li Wa. In this part of the book, attention is drawn to the well-executed translations of numerous short stories, although, as far as I know, the author of the book is very good. Dudbridge has never published his translations separately.

The final part of the book includes articles about the Buddhist cult of the Five Road Generals in Dothan and Tang China, how the image of the monkey appeared in Journey to the West, the theme of pilgrimage in seventeenth-century prose, and the image of the goddess Huaye Sanniang in Cantonese ballads.

The reader may be deceived by the structural similarity of the collection with the monograph, which the publishers hardly claimed: too different subjects are covered in each of the articles, and combining them under one cover does not give them a fundamentally new quality. Publications of this kind are good because they save readers, mainly young people, from having to search libraries for old magazines. Mr. Dudbridge's articles are not out of date. If we consider the publication of the collection as summing up the results of the scientist's creative career, then the conclusions can be made the most positive, because the author appears to be a deep researcher and a talented organizer of science, and it is obvious that the administrative activities of G. Dudbridge did not change his scientific preferences.

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