For close to two hundred years, the ideas of Shakespeare have inspired incredible work in the literature, fiction, theater, and cinema of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From the novels of Lao She and Lin Shu to Lu Xun’s search for a Chinese ‘Shakespeare, ‘ and from Feng Xiaogang’s martial arts films to labor camp memoirs, Soviet-Chinese theater, Chinese opera in Europe, and silent film, Shakespeare has been put to work in unexpected places, yielding a rich trove of transnational imagery and paradoxical citations in popular and political culture.
Chinese Shakespeares is the first book to concentrate on both Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare’s appearance in Sinophone culture and their ambiguous relationship to the postcolonial question. Substantiated by case studies of major cultural events and texts from the first Opium War in 1839 to our times, Chinese Shakespeares theorizes competing visions of ‘China’ and ‘Shakespeare’ in the global cultural marketplace and challenges the logic of fidelity-based criticism and the myth of cultural exclusivity. In her critique of the locality and ideological investments of authenticity in nationalism, modernity, Marxism, and personal identities, Huang reveals the truly transformative power of Chinese Shakespeares.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Texts and Translation
Prologue
Part I. Theorizing Global Localities
1. Owning Chinese Shakespeares
Part II. The Fiction of Moral Space
2. Shakespeare in Absentia: The Genealogy of an Obsession
3. Rescripting Moral Criticism: Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, and Lao She
Part III. Locality at Work
4. Silent Film and Early Theater: Performing Womanhood and Cosmopolitanism
5. Site-Specific Readings: Confucian Temple, Labor Camp, and Soviet-Chinese Theater
Part IV. Postmodern Shakespearean Orients
6. Why Does Everyone Need Chinese Opera?
7. Disowning Shakespeare and China
Epilogue
Select Chronology
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
About the author
Alexa Huang is Professor of English, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at George Washington University where she co-founded and co-directs the Digital Humanities Institute. Her other books include Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation.
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