How to Read Chinese Drama - (How to Read Chinese Literature) by Patricia Sieber & Regina S Llamas (Paperback)

About the Book

"How to Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology introduces students to the wide world of Chinese theater through excerpts from and context about 14 plays. Special attention is paid to how those plays are realized on stage. These examples cover the entire history of the most important genres up to the maturity of Peking opera in the second half of the nineteenth century. Students will be exposed to many play texts and aspects of Chinese theater, including three types of expressive modes-music (music and singing), text (speaking/reciting/written text), and movements (acting)-historical, biographical, and sociopolitical backgrounds about Chinese drama and playwrights, staging and rituals, and close textual analyses. The book is designed to be used independently or in concert with How to Read Chinese Drama: A Language Text, but the guided anthology volume does not assume any knowledge of Chinese"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

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).