Read more
Xiaomei Chen offers a new account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, she identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspirations for the social role of performance.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Theater Founding Fathers: Liberal Aesthetics in the Republican Period
1. Tian Han and His Legacy: Proletarian Modernism and “The Theater of Dramatists”
2. Hong Shen and His Discontent: Canonicity Through Theory and Practice
3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream: Cross-Dressing, Drama Schools, and Theater Reforms
Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife: Shifting “Classics” and Their Place in Cultural Transformation
4. Is Socialism Good? Satirical Comedy and the Gray Theater of the 1950s
5. The Tales of the Wives: The Mao-Era Metamorphosis of the “Red Classics” and Their Postsocialist Reinscriptions
6. “The Song of the Geologists”: Remembering Scientists Onstage
7. Monumental Theater: Soldier Plays and History Plays
8. Singing “The Internationale”: One Hundred Years of Sonic Theater
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Xiaomei Chen (Indiana PhD) is professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film and the Afterlives of Propaganda (CUP, 2016); Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford, 1995; second and expanded edition, 2002), Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Hawai'i, 2002); and editor of Reading the Right Text (Hawai'i, 2003) and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (CUP, 2010; abridged edition 2014).
Summary
Xiaomei Chen offers a new account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, she identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspirations for the social role of performance.
