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The novel and theatrical imagination in early modern China

Using the concept of theatricality to study Water Margin and Journey to the West, this study illustrates how writing and reading in early modern China became fused with a theatrical imagination in response to destabilizing social and political forces.The cultural fascination with and imagination of theater has long been overlooked as an important historical and literary context for reading Water Margin and Journey to the West. This study focuses on the concept of "the theatrical" to read those novels and their commentaries. Imbued with performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship, the early modern theatrical novel borrowed heavily from theater to conflate the theatrical and the real, juggle theatrical roles, persons, and identities, and contest orthodoxies by challenging and appropriating sites of control and authority. This study showcases the theatrical novel's unique position as a new form of literati self-representation in response to the destabilizing social and political forces of early modern China.

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

The novel and theatrical imagination in early modern China

The cultural fascination with and imagination of theater has long been overlooked as an important historical and literary context for reading Water Margin and Journey to the West. This study focuses on the concept of "the theatrical" to read those novels and their commentaries. Imbued with performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship, the early modern theatrical novel borrowed heavily from theater to conflate the theatrical and the real, juggle theatrical roles, persons, and identities, and contest orthodoxies by challenging and appropriating sites of control and authority. This study showcases the theatrical novel's unique position as a new form of literati self-representation in response to the destabilizing social and political forces of early modern China.

Shanghai urban life and its heterogeneous cultural entanglements

"In this book, Xiong Yuezhi and a team of distinguished scholars bring together cutting-edge research on the urban history of Shanghai and the diversity of its distinctive culture. Occupying an interstitial space between Chinese and foreign power, Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century experienced almost unimaginably complex developments in its political, social, economic, and cultural history. To untangle this complexity, Xiong and his team have carefully constructed, in thematic and chronological fashion, the interactions between the imperialist powers, foreign settlers, and the Chinese community of Shanghai from the origins of the racially-segregated International Settlement in the 1840s to the internment of foreign settlers in Shanghai during World War II in the 1940s"--In this book, Xiong Yuezhi and a team of distinguished scholars bring together cutting-edge research on the urban history of Shanghai and the diversity of its distinctive culture. Occupying an interstitial space between Chinese and foreign power, Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century experienced almost unimaginably complex developments in its political, social, economic, and cultural history. To untangle this complexity, Xiong and his team have carefully constructed, in thematic and chronological fashion, the interactions between the imperialist powers, foreign settlers, and the Chinese community of Shanghai from the origins of the racially-segregated International Settlement in the 1840s to the internment of foreign settlers in Shanghai during World War II in the 1940s.