Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies - (Studies in the History of Chinese Texts) by Yinghui Wu (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book is an in-depth exploration of the mutual transformation of drama and media environments in early modern China. It develops a new model of drama history to account for the whole continuum of cultural experiences that encompassed writer, reader, illustrator, singer, and many others.

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Yinghui Wu, Ph.D. (2014), Washington University in St. Louis, is Associate Professor of Chinese at University of California, Los Angeles. She has published on print culture, popular culture, and intermediality in early modern China. She is also a co-editor of Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).