Suyoung Son's monograph follows the careers of two early Qing literati writers-cum-publishers, Zhang Chao 張潮 (1650–ca. 1707) and Wang Zhuo 王晫 (1636–ca. 1707). The result is far more than a solidly researched and lucidly written account of how print was socially used in shaping literati communities with transregional impacts. Son's ultimate achievement lies in ascribing back to the print medium per se the social processes surrounding it, not as its origins or explanatory causes but as effects testifying to its structure of temporality, which challenges us to rethink how a media history can be told.Son opens the book with Chinese literati's mixed feelings toward print since the sixteenth century: less costly self-publishing rendered reputation achievable during one's lifetime but also provoked suspicions of diminished merit. Meanwhile, such ambivalence toward print also motivated “conflicting expectations”: “Writers used it to target a small, exclusive readership consisting of one's chosen coterie and sought to obtain peer recognition of the value of one's text, yet they also strove to attain the broadest possible circulation in the commercial market network so as to secure fame, economic gain, and social influence” (5). This spatial paradox—staying within a close circle and going places—can be resolved only by retemporalizing print as “a process” (6). Fixating our eyes on print in the “end product” form, we tend to reduce the production process into a unilinear one from a manuscript at the origin of creation to mass-reproduced printed copies for widespread circulation, entrenching dichotomies between manuscript and print and between writing and reading. Retemporalizing print means that Son “breaks with the tendency to emphasize the rupture between manuscript and print culture, instead focusing on their overlapping interaction,” and sees printing less “closing off the act of writing” than “constantly invit[ing] readerly interventions” (5–6).The first three chapters, which comprise part 1 of the book, flesh out the various aspects of what I have just described as retemporalization of print. Chapter 1 details Zhang Chao's production procedure, which, against the usual expectation of quantity printing, operates “in the same way that manuscript was used . . . for controlling text circulation among a select coterie and for facilitating communication among members of a coterie that kept the writer in personal touch with his readers, thereby retaining the cultural exclusivity that manuscript tradition evoked” (20). In tandem with the closeness of the circuit (where print behaves like manuscript in controlled circulation) is the nonlinearity of the production process per se (where the flow from manuscript to print and from author to reader becomes reversible). Unraveling the false image of print as a finished object, Son underscores the technical operation in seventeenth-century China, where copies readers usually got were packs of unbound leaves (since binding was conventionally their duty), and the feedback loop through which readers' comments on intermediate samples they received—as well as comments on one another's comments—were solicited and incorporated at various stages of the book production. A case in point is Zhang Chao's volume of epigrams Youmeng ying 幽夢影, with his associates' commentaries, which, as Son remarkably illustrates, reads like a live chat on printed pages.Such nonlinear looping within a close circle effectuates what I would call presentness, as hinted by Wang Zhuo's title Jin Shishuo 今世說 (Contemporary Tales of the World, 1683), which Son discusses in chapter 2. Presentness should not be understood as contemporaneity—which Benedict Anderson has associated with the linearity of “homogeneous, empty time” in print capitalism1—but as instantaneity. Rather than forging an imagined community mediated by the fiction of “meanwhile,” print as Son characterizes it produces a different kind of fiction of instant reverberation of recognition among acquaintances. Fame feels instant as it is declared de facto within the publication itself, in a tenuous relation to merit. Chapter 2 thus circles back to the anxiety of the widening gap between reputation and merit. According to Son, Wang Zhuo attempted to bridge the gap by soliciting an extraordinary amount of paratextual endorsements and by curating anecdotes published by others authenticating himself and his coterie as accomplished celebrities (as in Jin Shishuo). The problem is that “the traditional peer patronage . . . had become increasingly destabilized in seventeenth-century China, as economic, social, and political transformations accelerated the diversification and stratification of the literati community”; hence Wang's merit was questioned by “other literary groups.” To compensate, “the competitive viability of reputation could no longer depend completely on coterie patronage but needed to be supplemented by other means, such as the acknowledgment of a widening readership that print made possible” (88). For Son, such “a widening readership” is suggested in Huang Zhouxing's 黃周星 (1611–1680) variety play (zaju 雜劇) Xihua bao 惜花報 (Recompense for Cherishing Flowers) commissioned by Wang Zhuo. Based on Wang's classical tale about his being summoned by the flower goddess for his literary reputation, this closet play, as Son again brilliantly dissects, not only posits Wang Zhuo himself as a spectator to his own fantasy but also opens this spectating position up for popular readers outside Wang's circle.That constitutes the pivot in Son's book, shifting focus from coterie publishing, which controls circulation as much as manuscript does, to print-for-spectating, which does more what quantity printing supposedly does after a calculated postponement. The spatial demarcation of outsiders is therefore a function derived from the temporal mode of duration (time spent on waiting and basking in the elite aura).2 Chapter 3 details how Wang Zhuo and Zhang Chao waded into book commerce and turned “the aura of elite prestige” into “popularity and market value” and vice versa (123–24). After gifting a limited number of printed copies to his coterie, he rented the carved woodblocks to commercial bookshops so that he “was able to distribute his printed copies to a wider readership without the additional overhead cost of paper, ink, and labor” (112); and “he continued to give his close coterie printed copies without cost but had readers outside his group of friends pay for their copies” (109–10). To maximize the conversion of elite prestige into popular appeal, the form of compendium (congshu 叢書), which originated in the Song dynasty, was now appropriated and repurposed, not to preserve old eminent works but to encompass contemporary casual pieces in “miscellaneous and less esteemed genres [xiaopin 小品]” (118). As Son acutely observes, items included in Tanji congshu 檀几叢書 (Collectanea of a Sandalwood Desk) coedited by Wang and Zhang and Zhang's independent venture Zhaodai congshu 昭代叢書 (Collectanea of a Glorious Age ) were “selected less for their literary merit than for the information in them” about “the most recent cultural, intellectual, and political trends” (120–21) demanded by “the widening pool of readers . . . who aspired to acquire a semblance of insider knowledge and information” (123).Part 2 of the book, on censorship in Qing China and Chosŏn Korea, is then a continuation of this pivotal turn toward a widening readership, only this time receptive customers are replaced by skeptical states. Taking Zhang Chao's contemporary tale collection Yu Chu xinzhi 虞初新志 (New Records of Yu Chu) for a case study, chapter 4 debunks the unfounded view that what the Qing state censored was his anti-Manchu ideas. Son insightfully relocates the politics of censorship in Zhang Chao's publishing practices per se, rather than in any specific ideology. Yu Chu xinzhi's exclusion from the Siku quanshu 四庫全書 (Complete Library of the Four Branches of Literature), as the censors explained, was a rebuttal to Zhang and his coterie's capitalization on their blatant self-adulation at the expense of merit, as symptomized by the compilation's obsession with “petty talk” (xiaoshuo 小說) that lacked “reliable evidence and verifiable information” (158–60). Here Son detects an anxiety about the rampant vogue and sweeping influence of private literati publishing, which threatened the state authority in textual production (160–61). The worry was deepened, she suggests, by the very way Yu Chu xinzhi was compiled and published in installments—a strategy to hook readers and contributors—which made the compilation still more desultory and unpredictably ambiguous in the censors' eyes.Chapter 5 complements this revisionist account of Qing censorship with its specular reflection abroad. Son follows the widening readership across borders when Qing publications were imported by Chosŏn Korean merchants and emissaries. Himself an ardent reader of Wang Zhuo and Zhang Chao, King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800) later worried that ministers at court and local coteries imitated the frivolous style of Tanji congshu and Zhaodai congshu. Again, “the problem did not lie in certain ideas and books but in the active venues of circulation among the elite literati . . . increasingly uncontrollable by the state” (192). For all the apparent parallelism to Qing censorship, Son perspicaciously sees an ironical inversion: “[Compilers of Siku quanshu] considered Tanji congshu as failing to meet the standards of evidential research, whereas [Chŏngjo] perceived it as a typical example of evidential research,” which he denounced as a distraction from the orthodox neo-Confucian thoughts (191). So how to explain Chŏngjo's peculiar mapping that throws together what Qing bibliographers consider as incompatible? Son found the answer in the local politics, according to which discursive boundaries were “overshadowed by the political agenda that each monarch emphasized” (191). Rather than endorsing an absolute relativism, she suggests: “Whether Tanji congshu can be categorized as a book of evidential research is, however, a matter of contention,” because “Zhang Chao and his coterie reveal no particular intellectual orientation in compiling the book” (190).We seem to have been guided through a linear order of reading space from center to periphery: the coterie (mostly based in Jiangnan) monopolizing insider knowledge; book buyers who consumed secondhand information; the Qing court, a peevish competitor for authority whose value judgment was tendential but whose characterization of Wang-Zhang's private publishing still coincided with their own self-understanding; and finally, the Chosŏn readers, who mistook Wang-Zhang for what they weren't. What underlies such spatial linearity is precisely the pivotal turn from print behaving like manuscript to print behaving like . . . itself. Does this mean that the retemporalization of print ends up just relinearizing time such that the conventional chronology from manuscript to print is simply displaced into the dual-phase account of print itself? If not, how should we describe the before and after of the pivotal turn—and, ultimately, manuscript and print—in a genuinely nonlinear way?To answer these questions, one may read backward for clues against the linear spacing of readership. For one thing, Chosŏn readers' categorical misrecognition arose from their insight into the very problematic inherent in the Chinese order of discourse: xiaoshuo (petty talk) as a catch-all term had sucked in the whole fourfold taxonomy (classics, masters, histories, and collected writing) by the late sixteenth century.3 Similarly, the Qing censors' disparagement of Zhang Chao's petty talk for lacking “verifiable information” actually recuperated Zhang's own vision of Yu Chu xinzhi as a collection of “veritable records,” which he reluctantly compromised under Wang Zhuo's pressure to include the latter's fantastic tale (88n87). Nor were popular readers the only ones thirsty for “insider knowledge and information”; even from inside Zhang Chao's coterie “fervent requests [were made] for the recent literary news and information that drove his publishing” (120). In each and every case, the periphery signifies something primordial, while the center is always already derivative.Such spatial order reversals are traceable to the temporal structure in the pivotal turn from coterie publishing (instantaneousness) to print-for-spectating (duration). For Michael Fried, who lays down these temporal terms in advocating modern art's resistance to theatricality,4 that turn would spell a surrender to theater. For Son, dealing with a different context, it is a sociopsychological drama of supplement: the anxiety over “growing separation of merit and reputation” led to Wang Zhuo's obsession with peer endorsements, only to backfire by provoking criticism from other coteries, which then motivated him to look for “acknowledgment of a widening readership” by which “the competitive viability of reputation . . . needed to be supplemented” (87–88). In conclusion, “contemporary publicity, wide dissemination, and high market value became important because they could and did supplement the increasingly weakening authority of peer patronage” (197–98). But this account makes more sense when read backward. At every turn, the “supplement” Wang sought—buzz and hype—aggravated instead of compensating his merit deficit, which became more a result of his whole operation than its cause. Print-for-spectating does not “supplement” coterie publishing; rather, as a dangerous supplement, the former inscribes itself right in the latter at the origin. Theatricality already took place when coterie members staged a reality show among themselves (as Son's close reading of Xihua bao illustrates), which couldn't help but assert “the primacy of the readers/beholders” on the outside and instigate duration amid instantaneity.5This inverted reading brings out and taps into the full strength of Son's nonlinear account of print and manuscript at the outset. If coterie publishing operates in such a way that print behaves like manuscript, Son shows us that the ensuing extension to print-for-spectating doesn't signify a fulfilled teleology of quantity printing. Rather, just as theatricality is not opposite but essential to coterie publishing, the fulfillment of print as such lies in the intermediality between print and manuscript. Ontologically, print-being-itself is predicated on how it provides a material condition ambivalent enough for it to become something opposite to itself, namely, manuscript. Son rightly notes that the easiness of carving changes directly to woodblocks lent woodblock print the “malleability intrinsic to manuscript transmission” (42–43). We should also see the manuscript-like control of circulation have to do with Wang-Zhang's control over their woodblocks, which were still expensive to prepare at the time; the materiality of print thus explains how it could function like manuscript.Son thus substantiates with solid historical evidence Marshall McLuhan's rather mysterious formulation, “the medium is the message,” which means, among other things, that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.” But if Son tends to explain the “overlapping interaction” between print and manuscript by citing literati agency, with “the use of print as mediated by elite writers' literary, economic, and social desires” rather than as an “outcome of technological ascendency” (5), McLuhan rebukes the notion of “use” by mocking a gun rights scripted line still sadly reverberating in our time: “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.”6 Perhaps, as John Durham Peters provocatively argues, we all need a dose of “technological determinism,” a scandalous notion people mention only to dismiss.7 Son's most profound insight is not that seventeenth-century literati made a peculiar use of print but that the technical affordances of woodblock print entail so much ambivalence to so many surprising effects that our linear account of print vis-à-vis manuscript is no longer adequate.