Download or read book The Generals of the Yang Family written by Wilt L. Idema and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a complete translation of four early plays of the Yang Family Generals. The story of the Yang Family Generals, particularly its female generals, was a perennial favorite on the Chinese stage in the 19th and 20th centuries. In detailing the role of this military family in the Song-Khitan wars of the late 10th and early 11th centuries, these four plays are all in the form of zaju, a type of play that originated in the 13th century. These plays are from the 15th and 16th centuries and allow a glimpse into earlier renditions of the Yang Family saga, which is a decidedly more male-centered tradition than that performed in the Qing dynasty. This volume offers the only complete English-language translation of these early plays. These plays allow access to the earliest phase in the development of the Yang Family saga. The plays provide information on the staging of large battle scenes on the stage and have considerable literary and cultural value.

Download or read book Generals Of The Yang Family The Four Early Plays written by Wilt Lukas Idema and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013-07-29 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a complete translation of four early plays of the Yang Family Generals. The story of the Yang Family Generals, particularly its female generals, was a perennial favorite on the Chinese stage in the 19th and 20th centuries. In detailing the role of this military family in the Song-Khitan wars of the late 10th and early 11th centuries, these four plays are all in the form of zaju, a type of play that originated in the 13th century. These plays are from the 15th and 16th centuries and allow a glimpse into earlier renditions of the Yang Family saga, which is a decidedly more male-centered tradition than that performed in the Qing dynasty.This volume offers the only complete English-language translation of these early plays. These plays allow access to the earliest phase in the development of the Yang Family saga. The plays provide information on the staging of large battle scenes on the stage and have considerable literary and cultural value.

Download or read book A Topsy Turvy World written by Wilt L. Idema and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playwriting in many forms flourished during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Shorter theatrical genres in particular offered playwrights opportunities for experimentation with both dramatic form and social critique. Despite their originality and wit, these short plays have been overshadowed by the lengthy masterpieces of the southern drama tradition. A Topsy-Turvy World presents English translations of shorter sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century plays, spotlighting a lesser-known side of Chinese drama. Satirical and often earthy, these mostly one-act plays depict deceit, dissembling, reversed gender roles, and sudden upending of fortunes. With zest and humor, they portray henpecked husbands, supercilious and lustful monks, all-too-human sage kings, disgruntled officials, and overreaching young scholars. These plays provide a glimpse of Chinese daily life and mores even as they question or subvert the boundaries of social, moral, and political order. Each translation is preceded by a short introduction that describes the play’s author, context, formal qualities, and textual history. A Topsy-Turvy World offers a new view of a significant period in the development of the Chinese theatrical tradition and provides insight into the role of drama as cultural critique.

Download or read book The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays written by Stephen H. West and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first anthology of Yuan-dynasty zaju (miscellaneous comedies) to introduce the genre to English-speaking readers exclusively through translations of the plays' fourteenth-century editions. Almost all previous translations of Yuan-dynasty zaju are based on late-Ming regularized editions that were heavily adapted for performance at the Ming imperial court and then extensively revised in the seventeenth century for the reading pleasure of Jiangnan literati. These early editions are based on leading actor scripts and contain arias, prose dialogue, and cue lines. They encompass a fascinating range of subject matter, from high political intrigue to commoner life and religious conversion. Crackling with raw emotion, violent imagery, and colorful language and wit, the zaju in this volume explore the consequences of loyalty and betrayal, ambition and enlightenment, and piety and drunkenness. The collection features seven of the twenty-six available untranslated zaju published in the fourteenth century, with a substantial introduction preceding each play and extensive annotations throughout. The editors also include translations of the Ming versions of four of the included plays and an essay that synthesizes recent Chinese and Japanese scholarship on the subject.

Download or read book Yangzhou A Place in Literature written by Roland Altenburger and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-01-31 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the famous canal cities of the world and a former center of culture, trade, transportation, and fashion, the old town of Yangzhou evokes romantic bridges, beautiful courtesans, fine gardens, and eccentric painters. It is also remembered as a war-torn ruin after the Qing conquest and the Taiping Rebellion, and as a city in decline as trade shifted to seaports and railways. Yangzhou, A Place in Literature, the first anthology to center on a Chinese city and its local region, offers a wealth of literary, semi-literary, and oral texts representing social life over three hundred years of dramatic change between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The selections in this volume represent a wide range of literary forms and styles, both elite and popular, with subjects ranging from literature, history, theater, and art to the history of architecture and gardening, and of material culture at large. Readers will come across rarely found details of everyday life, the sights, smells, and sounds of the lanes and teahouses, a world of taverns, pilgrimages, communal baths, fish markets, salt merchants, acting troupes, and food in one of the wealthiest cities of imperial China. Each text has an introductory essay and rich textual notes by an expert in the relevant field. The general introduction provides an in-depth discussion of the roles of the local in historical, cultural, literary, and linguistic terms, as mirrored by the wide range of translated sources collected in this volume. The selected texts are historically and intellectually important in their own right, but the volume greatly enhances their collective value by combining them, arranging them in historical sequence, and providing a dense network of cross-references that invite comparisons and reveal contrasts in style, form, focus, and topic. With its compelling accounts of material culture, urban spaces, entertainment, and gender, Yangzhou, A Place in Literature will fascinate scholars and students alike by opening a window to the rich cultural history of Yangzhou. The volume can serve as a textbook for courses on traditional and modern Chinese literature, popular culture, the city, or social history. It will be of great interest to scholars of East Asian studies, as well as to those in a variety of comparative fields, such as urban studies, theater studies, and gender studies.

Download or read book 1616 Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu s China written by Tian Yuan Tan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year is 1616. William Shakespeare has just died and the world of the London theatres is mourning his loss. 1616 also saw the death of the famous Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu. Four hundred years on and Shakespeare is now an important meeting place for Anglo-Chinese cultural dialogue in the field of drama studies. In June 2014 (the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth), SOAS, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the National Chung Cheng University of Taiwan gathered 20 scholars together to reflect on the theatrical practice of four hundred years ago and to ask: what does such an exploration mean culturally for us today? This ground-breaking study offers fresh insights into the respective theatrical worlds of Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu and asks how the brave new theatres of 1616 may have a vital role to play in the intercultural dialogue of our own time.

Download or read book Tsui Hark s Peking Opera Blues written by Tan See Kam and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part historical drama, part thriller, and part comedy, Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues (1986) invites--if not demands--examinations from multiple perspectives. Tan See Kam rises to the challenge in this study by first situating Tsui in a Sinophone context. The diasporic director explores different dimensions of "Chineseness" in the film by depicting competing versions of Chinese nationalism and presenting characters speaking two Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin. In the process he compels viewers to recognize the multiplicities of the Chinese identity and rethink what constitutes cultural Chineseness. The challenge to a single definition of "Chinese" is also embodied by the playful pastiches of diverse materials. In a series of intertextual readings, Tan reveals the full complexity of Peking Opera Blues by placing it at the center of a web of texts consisting of Tsui's earlier film Shanghai Blues (1984), Hong Kong's Mandarin Canto-pop songs, the "three-women" films in Chinese-language cinemas, and of course, traditional Peking opera, whose role-types, makeup, and dress code enrich the meaning of the film. In Tan's portrayal, Tsui Hark is a filmmaker who makes masterly use of postmodernist techniques to address postcolonial concerns. More than a quarter of a century after its release, Tan shows, Peking Opera Blues still reverberates in the present time.

Download or read book Teaching the Global Middle Ages written by Geraldine Heng and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2022-10-28 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past. The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.

Download or read book Passion Poverty and Travel written by Wilt Lukas IDEMA and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2015-05-22 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Translations from Chinese popular literature of the late-imperial and early republican periods are still very rare, and selections that are devoted to a specific genre or dialect rarer still. These translations of traditional Hakka popular literature are not only a contribution to a broader knowledge of traditional Chinese folk literature, but also contribute to the study of Hakka culture as reflected in these racy songs and exciting narratives. This book is the first extensive selection in English of traditional Hakka mountain songs (shange) and long narrative ballads in various genres. One chapter is devoted to songs and ballads on Hakka migration to Taiwan and Southeast Asia in 18th to 20th centuries. The selection of mountain songs is primarily based on a collection compiled before 1949. The ballads selected focus on texts that were widely popular in late-Qing and early Republican times, but post-Liberation performances and new compositions have been included for contrast. All translations are provided with an introduction and annotations."--

Download or read book Crossing Boundaries and Confounding Identity written by Cheryl C. D. Hughes and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-02-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crossing Borders and Confounding Identity advances our understanding of the diversity of Chinese women's experiences and achievements, from the Han Dynasty to the present. With a particular emphasis on literature and the arts, the chapters offer insights into the work of current Chinese women artists as well as literary, historical, and cultural portrayals of women and women's issues. Taken together, they provide new perspectives on Chinese women, their lived experiences and fictional representations, across a broad spectrum of literature, theater, film, and the visual arts. Accessible to nonspecialists and general readers, this book will also be a valuable resource for faculty who teach Asian studies courses in history and in the humanities, as well as for students in interdisciplinary Asian studies courses.

Download or read book Transforming Tradition written by Siyuan Liu and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-07-21 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the PRC launched a reform campaign that targeted traditional song and dance theater encompassing more than a hundred genres, collectively known as xiqu. Reformers censored or revised xiqu plays and techniques; reorganized star-based private troupes; reassigned the power to create plays from star actors to the newly created functions of playwright, director, and composer; and eliminated market-oriented functionaries such as agents. While the repertoire censorship ended in the 1980s, major reform elements have remained: many traditional scripts (or parts of them) are no longer in performance; actors whose physical memory of repertoire and acting techniques had been the center of play creation, have been superseded by directors, playwrights, and composers. The net result is significantly diminished repertoires and performance techniques, and the absence of star actors capable of creating their own performance styles through new signature plays that had traditionally been one of the hallmarks of a performance school. Transforming Tradition offers a systematic study of the effects of the comprehensive reform of traditional theater conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, and is based on a decade’s worth of exhaustive research of official archival documents, wide-ranging interviews, and contemporaneous publications, most of which have never previously been referenced in scholarly research.

Download or read book Marionette Plays from Northern China written by and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marionette puppet theater has a rich and ancient history in China, extending back to the Han dynasty and reaching its heyday in the Qing dynasty. While this art form is nearly extinct in northern China today, a handful of troupes in Heyang County in Shaanxi Province, which claims to be the birthplace of marionette theater, continue to perform skits and scenes from Heyang's earlier, broader marionette theater repertoire. In this book, Fan Pen Li Chen has collected and translated rare transcriptions of some of the most popular of these plays. Her insightful translations include a rich variety of genres and highlight memorable characters that range from manipulative aristocrats, poor Confucian scholars, and a woman warrior to Baldy Guo, the iconic clown of puppet theater. As the only work in English about the puppet theater of northern China, these translations provide valuable information about the history, religion, social roles, and popular culture of that region. Detailed introductions and annotations for each play, as well as an extensive bibliography, are also included.

Download or read book Guan Yu written by Barend J. ter Haar and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guan Yu was a minor general in the early third century CE, who supported one of numerous claimants to the throne. He was captured and executed by enemy forces in 219. He eventually became one the most popular and influential deities of imperial China under the name Lord Guan or Emperor Guan, of the same importance as the Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin. This is a study of his cult, but also of the tremendous power of oral culture in a world where writing became increasingly important. In this study, we follow the rise of the deity through his earliest stage as a hungry ghost, his subsequent adoption by a prominent Buddhist monastery during the Tang (617-907) as its miraculous supporter, and his recruitment by Daoist ritual specialists during the Song dynasty (960-1276) as an exorcist general. He was subsequently known as a rain god, a protector against demons and barbarians, and, eventually, a moral paragon and almost messianic saviour. Throughout his divine life, the physical prowess of the deity, more specifically Lord Guan's ability to use violent action for doing good, remained an essential dimension of his image. Most research ascribes a decisive role in the rise of his cult to the literary traditions of the Three Kingdoms, best known from the famous novel by this name. This book argues that the cult arose from oral culture and spread first and foremost as an oral practice.

Download or read book The Dynamic Essence of Transmedia Storytelling written by Barbara Wall and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-11 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dynamic Essence of Transmedia Storytelling challenges many established truths about popular literary classics by presenting an analysis of sixty Korean variations of The Journey to the West, a set which includes novels and poems, as well as films, comics, paintings, and dance performances dating from the 14th century until today. In contrast to the typical assumption that literary classics like The Journey to the West are stable texts with a single original, Barbara Wall approaches The Journey to the West as a dynamic text comprised of all its variations. She argues that all the creators of such variations, from Korean scholars in the 14th century to “boy bands” like Seventeen in the 21st century, participate in the ongoing story world known as The Journey to the West. Wall employs literary and quantitative analysis, ample graphic visualizations, and in-depth descriptions of classroom games to find new ways to understand the dynamics of transmedia storytelling and popular engagement with story worlds. Her approach opens new frontiers of intertextual analysis to literary scholars and teachers of literature who seek contemporary methods of introducing world literature to new generations of students.

Download or read book Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture written by Margaret B. Wan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture provides a richly textured picture of cultural transmission in the Qing and early Republican eras. Drum ballad texts (guci) evoke one of the most popular performance traditions of their day, a practice that flourished in North China. Study of these narratives opens up surprising new perspectives on vital topics in Chinese literature and history: the creation of regional cultural identities and their relation to a central “Chinese culture”; the relationship between oral and written cultures; the transmission of legal knowledge and popular ideals of justice; and the impact of the changing technology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the reproduction and dissemination of popular texts. Margaret B. Wan maps the dissemination over time and space of two legends of wise judges; their journey through oral, written, and visual media reveals a fascinating but overlooked world of “popular” literature. While drum ballads form a distinctively regional literature, lithography in early twentieth-century Shanghai drew them into national markets. The new paradigm this book offers will interest scholars of cultural history, literature, book culture, legal history, and popular culture.

Download or read book Chinese Shadow Theatre written by Fan-Pen Li Chen and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her study of Chinese shadow theatre Fan-Pen Li Chen documents and corrects misconceptions about this once-popular art form. She argues how a traditional folk theatre reflected and subverted Chinese popular culture.

Download or read book Cross Dressing in Chinese Opera written by Siu Leung Li and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The enchantment of the figure of the "male dan" – female impersonator – remains a residual element in the cultural imagination of many contemporary Chinese societies. The various kinds of interpretive possibilities in the commanding tradition of cross-dressing Chinese opera have yet to be examined in-depth. In order to discuss "mistaken identity" and gender issues as they relate to cross-dressing on the Chinese operatic stage, this book examines a wide range of materials, including traditional dramatic texts, modern literary writings, critical writings (for example, quhua), opera paintings, and contemporary movies. The book explores gendering and gender differences that are constructed, reproduced, dismantled, and contested in this particularly rich site of Chinese culture.