Download or read book Peony in Love written by Lisa See and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-05-04 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peony has neither seen nor spoken to any man other than her father, a wealthy Chinese nobleman. Nor has she ever ventured outside the cloistered women's quarters of the family villa. As her sixteenth birthday approaches she finds herself betrothed to a man she does not know, but Peony has dreams of her own. Her father engages a theatrical troupe to perform scenes from The Peony Pavilion, a Chinese epic opera, in their garden amidst the scent of ginger, green tea and jasmine. 'Unmarried girls should not be seen in public,' says Peony's mother, but her father allows the women to watch from behind a screen. Here, Peony catches sight of an elegant, handsome man and is immediately bewitched. So begins her unforgettable journey of love, desire, sorrow and redemption.
Download or read book The Peony Pavilion written by Xiaoping Yen and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sixteen-year-old girl visits a forbidden garden and falls in love with a young man she meets in a dream. She has an affair with her dream-lover and dies longing for him. After her death, her unflagging spirit continues to wait for her dream-lover. Does her lover really exists? Can a youthful love born of a garden dream ever blossom? Based upon a famous sixteen-century Chinese opera written by Tang Xianzu, 'the Shakespeare of China', the novel leads the reader into a mythical world of passion and romance. Its many fascinating characters include a failed scholar, a Taoist nun, a husband and wife rebel team, a dissolute emperor, and Tartar invaders from the North.
Download or read book Peony Pavilion Onstage written by Catherine Swatek and published by U OF M CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES. This book was released on 2002 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores responses to Tang Xianzu's classic play The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting) from three distinct segments of its public-literati playwrights; professional performers of Kun opera; and quite recently, directors and audiences outside China. Catherine Swatek first examines two adaptations of the play by Tang's contemporaries, which point to the unconventionality of the original work. She goes on to explore how the play has been changed in later adaptations, up to its most recent productions by Peter Sellars and Chen Shi-Zheng in the United States and Europe. Catherine Swatek is Associate Professor, University of British Columbia. She has published several articles on premodern Chinese drama and on female representation in Chinese opera.
Download or read book Chinese Kunqu Opera written by Xiao Li and published by LONG RIVER PRESS. This book was released on 2005 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even before Beijing Opera there was Kunqu, an opera form with 600 years of history. This highly distinctive form of Chinese theatre art is comprised of various elements-music, singing, dancing, recitation, and movement. As China's oldest and most influential theatrical tradition, Kunqu combines poetic librettos from the cream of classic Chinese literature (The Peony Pavilion, The Story of the Lute, The Peach Blossom Fan, etc.) with soft and refined music. A vivid, fully-illustrated picture of the origins and development of this grand performing art.
Download or read book Peony written by Pearl S. Buck and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young Chinese woman falls in love with a Jewish man in nineteenth-century China in this evocative novel by the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth. In 1850s China, a young girl, Peony, is sold to work as a bondmaid for a rich Jewish family in Kaifeng. Jews have lived for centuries in this region of the country, but by the mid-nineteenth century, assimilation has begun taking its toll on their small enclave. When Peony and the family’s son, David, grow up and fall in love with one another, they face strong opposition from every side. Tradition forbids the marriage, and the family already has a rabbi’s daughter in mind for David. Long celebrated for its subtle and even-handed treatment of colliding traditions, Peony is an engaging coming-of-age story about love, identity, and the tragedy and beauty found at the intersection of two disparate cultures. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.
Download or read book Persons Roles and Minds written by Tina Lu and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on two late-Ming or early-Qing plays central to the Chinese canon (Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan), this study explores crucial questions concerning personal identity.
Download or read book Scenes for Mandarins written by Cyril Birch and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ming drama represents the classical Chinese theatre at its most mature. Between 1368 and 1644, more than 400 playwrights produced over 1500 plays, ranging from one-act skits to works with 50 scenes or more. As a performing art, Ming theatre includes polished singing, enchanting music, fantastic plotting, and intricate choreography.
Download or read book Worldly Stage written by Sophie Volpp and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In seventeenth-century China, as formerly disparate social spheres grew closer, the theater began to occupy an important ideological niche among traditional cultural elites, and notions of performance and spectatorship came to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. In this study of late-imperial Chinese theater, Sophie Volpp offers fresh readings of major texts such as Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting) and Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan), and unveils lesser-known materials such as Wang Jide’s play The Male Queen (Nan wanghou). In doing so, Volpp sheds new light on the capacity of seventeenth-century drama to comment on the cultural politics of the age. Worldly Stage arrives at a conception of theatricality particular to the classical Chinese theater and informed by historical stage practices. The transience of worldly phenomena and the vanity of reputation had long informed the Chinese conception of theatricality. But in the seventeenth century, these notions acquired a new verbalization, as theatrical models of spectatorship were now applied to the contemporary urban social spectacle in which the theater itself was deeply implicated."
Download or read book Passion for Peonies written by David Michener and published by University of MICHIGAN REGIONAL. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There’s no more breathtaking signal of summer’s onset than the blooming of peonies. Stunningly beautiful and relatively easy to grow, peonies are a favorite flower everywhere they can be cultivated and for good reason: the heady fragrances and enchanting colors of a peony-rich display create an immersive experience that has enamored generations of garden lovers across the world. This passion is on full display each June at the historic Peony Garden of the University of Michigan’s Nichols Arboretum. Originally planted in 1922, the Nichols Arboretum Peony Garden now boasts North America’s largest public collection of heirloom herbaceous peonies. The Peony Garden has become a sacred space for the Ann Arbor community, a not-to-be-missed sensation when it erupts each season, as the Ann Arbor Observer once wrote, in “a riot of color, of crimson, rose and shell pink intermingled with fluffy pompoms of creamy white.” The rather short period of peak bloom—about two fleeting weeks each year—only seems to intensify the garden’s appeal, drawing thousands of visitors annually to this spectacular “living museum” on campus that showcases upwards of 10,000 blossoms. Richly illustrated with hundreds of striking color photos, Passion for Peonies collects twenty short essays that celebrate the story of the Nichols Arboretum Peony Garden as well as the rich social history of peony gardening that it is an integral part of. Together these pieces comprise a love letter both to a magical public space at the University of Michigan and to the broader history and culture of peony gardening. The book will appeal to readers interested in the University of Michigan, the history of public gardens, and of course peonies!
Download or read book Pavilion of Women written by Pearl S. Buck and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “vivid and extremely interesting” novel of an upper-class Chinese wife’s quest for freedom, from the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth (The New Yorker). At forty, Madame Wu is beautiful and much respected as the wife of one of China’s oldest upper-class houses. Her birthday wish is to find a young concubine for her husband and to move to separate quarters, starting a new chapter of her life. When her wish is granted, she finds herself at leisure, no longer consumed by running a sixty-person household. Now she’s free to read books previously forbidden her, to learn English, and to discover her own mind. The family in the compound are shocked at the results, especially when she begins learning from a progressive, excommunicated Catholic priest. In its depiction of life in the compound, Pavilion of Women includes some of Buck’s most enchanting writing about the seasons, daily rhythms, and customs of women in China. It is a delightful parable about the sexes, and of the profound and transformative effects of free thought. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.
Download or read book Teachers of the Inner Chambers written by Dorothy Ko and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pathbreaking work argues that literate gentry women in 17th-century Jiangnan, far from being oppressed or silenced, created a rich culture and meaningful existence within the constraints of the Confucian system. Momentous socioeconomic and intellectual changes in 17th-century Jiangnan provided the stimulus for the flowering of women's culture. The most salient of these changes included a flourishing of commercial publishing, the rise of a reading public, a new emphasis on emotions, the promotion of women's education, and, more generally, the emergence of new definitions of womanhood. The author reconstructs the social, emotional and intellectual worlds of 17th-century women, and in doing so provides a new way to conceptualize China's past, one offering a more realistic and complete understanding of the values of Chinese culture and the functioning of Chinese society.
Download or read book Tales from China written by and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of Chinese stories begins with the great legends of how Earth and Heaven came into being. There are folk-tales too, about ghosts, rain-makers, students and magicians, and a man who is nearly made into fishpaste.
Download or read book Passion Romance and Qing written by Paolo Santangelo and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 1555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan written by Lisa See and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lily is the daughter of a humble farmer, and to her family she is just another expensive mouth to feed. Then the local matchmaker delivers startling news: if Lily's feet are bound properly, they will be flawless. In nineteenth-century China, where a woman's eligibility is judged by the shape and size of her feet, this is extraordinary good luck. Lily now has the power to make a good marriage and change the fortunes of her family. To prepare for her new life, she must undergo the agonies of footbinding, learn nu shu, the famed secret women's writing, and make a very special friend, Snow Flower. But a bitter reversal of fortune is about to change everything.
Download or read book China and the West written by Michael Saffle and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western music reached China nearly four centuries ago, with the arrival of Christian missionaries, yet only within the last century has Chinese music absorbed its influence. As China and the West demonstrates, the emergence of “Westernized” music from China—concurrent with the technological advances that have made global culture widely accessible—has not established a prominent presence in the West. China and the West brings together essays on centuries of Sino-Western musical exchange by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists from around the world. It opens with a look at theoretical approaches of prior studies of musical encounters and a comprehensive survey of the intercultural and cross-cultural theoretical frameworks—exoticism, orientalism, globalization, transculturation, and hybridization—that inform these essays. Part I focuses on the actual encounters between Chinese and European musicians, their instruments and institutions, and the compositions inspired by these encounters, while Part II examines theatricalized and mediated East-West cultural exchanges, which often drew on stereotypical tropes, resulting in performances more inventive than accurate. Part III looks at the musical language, sonority, and subject matters of “intercultural” compositions by Eastern and Western composers. Essays in Part IV address reception studies and consider the ways in which differences are articulated in musical discourse by actors serving different purposes, whether self-promotion, commercial marketing, or modes of nationalistic—even propagandistic—expression. The volume’s extensive bibliography of secondary sources will be invaluable to scholars of music, contemporary Chinese culture, and the globalization of culture.
Download or read book Proceedings of the 2019 DigitalFUTURES written by Philip F. Yuan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “2019 DigitalFUTURES — The 1st International Conference on Computational Design and Robotic Fabrication (CDRF 2019)” provides an international platform for advanced scientific research papers on the digital technology of architectural design and construction. The themes of the papers include, but are not limited to, architectural theories, tools, methods and procedures in material intelligence, data intelligence; computational intelligence, and robotic intelligence.
Download or read book The Jade Peony written by Wayson Choy and published by D & M Publishers. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three siblings tell the stories of their very different childhoods in Vancouver's Chinatown before and during World War II.
