Lexington Books Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth-century China: Plays by Tang Xianzu, Mei Dingzuo, Wu Bing, Li Yu, and Kong Shangren

Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth-Century China: Plays by Tang Xianzu, Mei Dingzuo, Wu Bing, Li Yu, and Kong Shangren is a full-length study of chuanqi (romance) drama, a sophisticated form with substantial literary and meta-theatrical value that reigned in Chinese theater from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and nourished later theatrical traditions including jingju (Beijing Opera). Highly educated dramatists used chuanqi to present in artistic form personal, social, and political concerns of their time. There were six outstanding examples of these trends, considered masterpieces in their time and ever since. This study presents them in their social and cultural context during the long seventeenth century (1580-1700), the period of great experimentation and political transition. The romantic spirit and independent thinking of the late Ming elite stimulated the efflorescence of the chuanqi, and that legacy was inherited and investigated during the second half of the seventeenth-century in early Qing. Jing Shen examinees the texts to demonstrate that the playwrights appropriate, convert, or misinterpret other genres or literary works of enduring influence into their plays to convey subtle and subversive expressions in the fine margins between tradition and innovation, history and theatrical re-presentation. By exploring the components of romance in texts from late Ming to early Qing, Shen reveals creative readings of earlier themes, stories, plays and the changing idea of romanticism for chuanqi drama. This study also shows the engagement of literati playwrights in closed literary circles in which chuanqi plays became a tool by which literati playwrights negotiated their agency and social stature. The five playwrights whose works are analyzed in this book had different experiences pursuing government service as scholar-officials; some failed to achieve high office. But their common concerns and self-conscious literary choices reveal important in Review Playwrights and Literary Games makes some important inroads toward a more comprehensive understanding of chuanqi, a labyrinthine genre that resists generalized characterizations at every turn. Going beyond the steps she has taken to define the genre, with all of its complexities and contradictions, Shen's focus on intertextuality ties chuanqi's formal aspects to its social functions in the late Ming-early Qing. Intertextual allusions represent an exclusive register within the genre, and a dialectic whereby audiences invest their own meanings into the text, embedding it within contemporary contexts and simultaneously tying it to history. Playwrights is a resource for scholars of chuanqi and more broadly for those interested in the cultural and literary history of China's long seventeenth century.--CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature Adaptations of earlier writings, the representations of identities (whether those of characters or the playwrights' own), the newly developed self-reflexivity in drama, and metatheatrical statements in various forms are all important concerns that Jing Shen weaves through her masterful readings of plays by six major dramatists of China's crucial seventeenth century-when traditional culture underwent the shattering trauma of subjugation by non-Chinese armies from the north. Throughout she demonstrates her deep knowledge of China's literary tradition by revealing the complex intertextual relations of each play. Professor Shen's richly detailed study firmly places these dramatic masterpieces in their historical, cultural, and even personal contexts to provide a vision of late imperial Chinese theater significantly more nuanced than achieved by any previous study in any Western language.--Robert E. Hegel, Washington University, St. Louis Considering the importance of chuanqi drama in Ming and Qing China and the recent revival of interest in the genre this book is extremely w