Description
This book is a comprehensive and inviting introduction to the literary forms and cultural significance of Chinese drama as both text and performance. Each chapter offers an accessible overview and critical analysis of one or more plays-canonical as well as less frequently studied works-and their historical contexts. How to Read Chinese Drama highlights how each play sheds light on key aspects of the dramatic tradition, including genre conventions, staging practices, musical performance, audience participation, and political resonances, emphasizing interconnections among chapters. It brings together leading scholars spanning anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, history, literature, and theater studies.
How to Read Chinese Drama is straightforward, clear, and concise, written for undergraduate students and their instructors as well as a wider audience interested in world theater. For students of Chinese literature and language, the book provides questions to explore when reading, watching, and listening to plays, and it features bilingual excerpts. For teachers, an analytical table of contents, a theater-specific chronology of events, and lists of visual resources and translations provide pedagogical resources for exploring Chinese theater within broader cultural and comparative contexts. For theater practitioners, the volume offers deeply researched readings of important plays together with background on historical performance conventions, audience responses, and select modern adaptations.
About the Author
Patricia Sieber is associate professor of Chinese at Ohio State University. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000 (2003).
Regina S. Llamas is associate professor in the humanities at IE University, Spain. She is the translator of Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play (Columbia, 2021).
Reviews
Another gem in Columbia's How to Read Chinese Literature series. From comic obscenities to heartbreaking lyricism, the expressive language of Chinese drama runs the gamut, making it the hardest but most rewarding of all genres. Now we have the perfect guide for novices and experts alike. -- Judith Zeitlin, coeditor of The Voice as Something More: Essays Toward Materiality
A stunning achievement in the study of Chinese drama. This well-structured and concisely composed anthology provides students, scholars, and general readers a timely scholarly book which is at once accessible and comprehensive. Highly recommended for theater studies, traditional and modern cultural and literary studies, comparative drama, and global performance studies! -- Xiaomei Chen, author of Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda
Traditional Chinese theater is a different kind of theater that synthesizes a great variety of performance modes, making it both difficult and very rewarding to learn and to teach. Bringing together a wide variety of approaches and focuses, How to Read Chinese Drama is an outstanding achievement. -- David L. Rolston, author of Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera: Textualization and Performance, Authorship and Censorship of the "National Drama" of China from the Late Qing to the Present
Perhaps the most helpful element in this excellent guide for students and scholars is its Thematic Contents list. By guiding the reader to related topics across its many descriptive and interpretive essays, it both demonstrates and provides access for understanding the richness and complexity of the Chinese theatrical tradition. -- Robert E. Hegel, cotranslator of A Couple of Soles
Book Information
ISBN 9780231186490
Author Patricia Sieber
Format Paperback
Page Count 480
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
How to Read Chinese Drama is straightforward, clear, and concise, written for undergraduate students and their instructors as well as a wider audience interested in world theater. For students of Chinese literature and language, the book provides questions to explore when reading, watching, and listening to plays, and it features bilingual excerpts. For teachers, an analytical table of contents, a theater-specific chronology of events, and lists of visual resources and translations provide pedagogical resources for exploring Chinese theater within broader cultural and comparative contexts. For theater practitioners, the volume offers deeply researched readings of important plays together with background on historical performance conventions, audience responses, and select modern adaptations.
About the Author
Patricia Sieber is associate professor of Chinese at Ohio State University. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000 (2003).
Regina S. Llamas is associate professor in the humanities at IE University, Spain. She is the translator of Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play (Columbia, 2021).
Reviews
Another gem in Columbia's How to Read Chinese Literature series. From comic obscenities to heartbreaking lyricism, the expressive language of Chinese drama runs the gamut, making it the hardest but most rewarding of all genres. Now we have the perfect guide for novices and experts alike. -- Judith Zeitlin, coeditor of The Voice as Something More: Essays Toward Materiality
A stunning achievement in the study of Chinese drama. This well-structured and concisely composed anthology provides students, scholars, and general readers a timely scholarly book which is at once accessible and comprehensive. Highly recommended for theater studies, traditional and modern cultural and literary studies, comparative drama, and global performance studies! -- Xiaomei Chen, author of Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda
Traditional Chinese theater is a different kind of theater that synthesizes a great variety of performance modes, making it both difficult and very rewarding to learn and to teach. Bringing together a wide variety of approaches and focuses, How to Read Chinese Drama is an outstanding achievement. -- David L. Rolston, author of Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera: Textualization and Performance, Authorship and Censorship of the "National Drama" of China from the Late Qing to the Present
Perhaps the most helpful element in this excellent guide for students and scholars is its Thematic Contents list. By guiding the reader to related topics across its many descriptive and interpretive essays, it both demonstrates and provides access for understanding the richness and complexity of the Chinese theatrical tradition. -- Robert E. Hegel, cotranslator of A Couple of Soles
Book Information
ISBN 9780231186490
Author Patricia Sieber
Format Paperback
Page Count 480
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
