The Cornucopian Stage : Performing Commerce in Early Modern China /
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The long seventeenth century in China was a period of tremendous commercial expansion, and no literary genre was better equipped to articulate its possibilities than southern drama. As a form and a practice, southern drama was in the business of world-building-both in its structural imperative to depict and reconcile the social whole and in its creation of entire economies dependent on its publication and performance. However, the early modern commercial world repelled rather than engaged most playwrights, who consigned its totems-the merchant and his money-to the margins as sources of political suspicion and cultural anxiety. In The Cornucopian Stage , Ariel Fox examines a body of influential yet understudied plays by a circle of Suzhou playwrights who enlisted the theatrical imaginary to very different ends. In plays about long-distance traders and small-time peddlers, impossible bargains and broken contracts, strings of cash and storehouses of silver, the Suzhou circle placed commercial forms not only at center stage but at the center of a new world coming into being. Here, Fox argues, the economic character of early modern selfhood is recast as fundamentally productive-as the basis for new subject positions, new kinds of communities, and new modes of art. See Less
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Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9780674293755
9781684176816
Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies /
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How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology-an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being refashioned in a variety of arts and media. This book explores a wide range of cultural experimentation, collectively termed "playing with plays:" the theatricality embedded in commentary, the poetic and visual imagination arising from drama illustrations, the interactions between reading and singing arias, the imbrication of reading plays and practicing religion, and the ludic act of writing playful essays on drama. Through engaging these disparate phenomena with media studies, the book advances a new model for thinking about drama history, and shows the entwinement of plays and different forms of media in shaping perception, molding experience, and enabling new subject positions to emerge in early modern China.
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1 online resource (270 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004731295