CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature最新文献

{"title":"Chinese Adaptations of Brecht: Appropriation and Intertextuality by Wei Zhang (review)","authors":"Janne Risum","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a910843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a910843","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139022725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Memories and Places in Twentieth-Century Suzhou Tanci","authors":"Yunjing Xu","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a898379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a898379","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:During China's Ming–Qing era, professional storytelling genres developed in economically and culturally advanced regions, alongside a mature book culture and major developments of theater genres. Since the eighteenth century, two Suzhoudialect-based storytelling genres emerged in the city of Suzhou and its neighboring area: tanci 彈詞 (plucking rhymes, chantefable) and pinghua 評話 (straight storytelling). Unlike pinghua's connection to time, that is, the history of different dynasties, the most popular tanci stories excel in presenting space: characters from many different tanci stories traverse a narrative universe that is based on spatial–temporal imagination of a constructed Jiangnan during the \"Ming\" Dynasty, often with Suzhou at its center. Therefore, tanci differs from many other performative genres and functions as a highly localized practice of collective memory: as an oral performative art, Suzhou tanci negotiates with both official history and plebian lore and legends; as a daily communal activity, it invites local audiences to practice imaginative reconstruction of Suzhou's past by embracing plots and characters in specific places that have specific spatial structures. Therefore, the charm of tanci lies not in the development of new stories but in resituating old local stories in the everchanging modern city to maintain a stable group identity for the locals.This study focuses on six tanci stories and their manifestations around the city of Suzhou. It integrates narratology, reception history, and cultural studies to explore the narrative, the performative, and the lived spaces of and around tanci, exploring the unique role of tanci in the shaping of local collective memory and identity.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41926807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Her Feet Hurt: Female Body and Pain in Chen Duansheng's Zaisheng yuan (Destiny of Rebirth)","authors":"We Ji","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a898380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a898380","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper investigates the female writer Chen Duansheng's tanci fiction Zaisheng yuan, a story centered on a cross-dressed female protagonist. Evoking storytelling and stage performance, tanci fiction is a lengthy, rhymed narrative genre favored by female writers in the early modern Jiangnan region. This paper approaches Zaisheng yuan from the perspectives of gender and the senses to examine its representations of the female foot and pain. Zaisheng yuan repeatedly associates pain with the female practice of footbinding and spotlights the bound foot to address the female characters' distress and identity crisis. While the haptic-oriented descriptions of female feet speak to the gender stereotypes, through depicting both passive and active revealing of female feet, Zaisheng yuan demonstrates the emerging possibilities of female agency. In contrast to the male literary tradition, which treats the female body as a static spectacle, Zaisheng yuan endeavors to portray bound feet as an ongoing experience that causes pain from daily movements and calls for sympathetic audiences and mutual support from the female community. However, there are also times when the experience of pain, physical and especially psychological, cannot be shared, not only between genders but also between mothers and daughters, and this may indeed create obstacles to female companionship. To sum up, pain caused by bound feet provides a framework to shape the way women experienced the world, identified themselves, and interpreted the possibilities and limitations of their ways of living in early modern Chinese society.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44197294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dungan Folktales and Legends transed. by Kenneth J. Yin (review)","authors":"Rostislav Berezkin","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a898383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a898383","url":null,"abstract":"Dungan Folktales and Legends is an anthology, translated by Kenneth J. Yin from the Russian edition of 1977. The Dungans have a very complex cultural background, as they are Chinese-speaking Muslims (speaking northwestern dialects, close to Mandarin) who originally lived in Gansu and Shaanxi provinces and fled to Russian Central Asia after the failure of the Dungan Revolt (1862–1877) against the Qing Dynasty. Recognized as a separate ethnic group of Central Asia, the exact history of the Dungan’s formation in the premodern period still remains not completely clear. There are several theories of their origins (including the origins of the “Dungan” name [Donggan in Pinyin], commonly used in Russian and several other languages).1 Now the Dungans live in Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan, and the northeastern area of Uzbekistan (formerly republics of the Soviet Union). This volume is the most comprehensive anthology of Dungan folk narratives, available now in English for the first time, and features masterly translations of the most outstanding and characteristic oral narratives collected in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in the mid-twentieth century. The original Russian collection was compiled by the famous Russian sinologist Boris L. Riftin (1932–2012) and two Dungan scholars: Makhmud A. Khasanov and Ilʹias I. Iusupov.2 Riftin started to collect Dungan tales in the 1950s, when he traveled to Kyrgyzstan and worked there at the Dungan collective farm in Milyanfan to study the language and folklore of this people, related to his interest in spoken Chinese and Chinese folk literature in general. It was not the first folkloric expedition of Russian sinologists to the Dungans. The work on collection and studies of Dungan folklore by Russian scholars started around the turn of the twentieth century, during the imperial period, as noted in the preface to this collection of tales.3 The present collection contains seventy-eight folk stories divided into three parts: (1) wonder tales and animal tales; (2) novel-type tales, folk anecdotes, and adventure stories; and (3) legends, historical tales, and narratives. The preface introduces the major special features and cultural status of the Dungan tales. The volume also has several appendixes, a glossary, an index, the original notes to the texts in the Russian translation, and translator’s notes aimed at an English-reading audience.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45762586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Religious Ambiguity, ICH, and Mulian Performances in Contemporary Huizhou, China","authors":"Liu Wei","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a898381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a898381","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Mulian performance has been an important part of the popular cultural imagination and religious practices of different Chinese cultural groups since at least the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). In late imperial Huizhou, it underwent a Confucian transformation to convey orthodox values and religious precepts. Through fieldwork on local Mulian traditions in three villages (Lixi 曆溪, Limu 栗木, and Mashan 馬山) of Qimen County, Anhui Province, since 2015, this paper discusses the contemporary theatrical and contextual transformations of Huizhou Mulian performances against the social and cultural background of folk religious revival amid the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) movement. I argue that since the popular religious practice of Mulian performance obtained the ICH designation, its ritualistic aspects of communal exorcism, magic spells, and deity worship have been systematically removed by the government through the strategies of fossilization, segmentation, and commodification. However, local performers and villagers might still harbor the religious orientation of eliciting good omens and fending off evil forces as well as belief in the supernatural and karmic retribution while acknowledging the official discourse. I use the term religious ambiguity to describe both the government's simultaneous ban on and tolerance of popular religious expressions and local people's uncertain, indefinite, and ambiguous attitude toward the supernatural in government heritage projects amid the ICH movement. This case study contributes to debates about how to \"modernize\" Chinese traditions without totally transforming them as well as discussions about how heritage politics and current Chinese socialist ideology affect local religious expressions and individual responses to revived folk traditions.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47632641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800–1937 by Margaret B. Wan (review)","authors":"Hanyang Jiang","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a898382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a898382","url":null,"abstract":"For years, drum ballads (guci 鼓詞) as a form of Chinese prosimetric literature (shuochang wenxue 說唱文學) suffered academic neglect. Falling under the general rubric of “popular literature” (suwenxue 俗文學), its texts have rarely if ever provoked thorough English-language surveys like those of other vernacular genres, such as chantefables (shuochang cihua 說唱詞話), transformation texts (bianwen 變文), or precious scrolls (baojuan寶卷).1 Folklorists and ethnomusicologists have primarily focused on drumsinging (dagu大鼓), treating the texts as mere libretti.2 Margaret Wan’s timely monograph fills in the gap. Her eclectic approach situates drum ballads as a hub through which to reconceptualize the “regional,” while at the same time tackling three modes of textual production (manuscript, woodblock print, and lithography) and their interactions with oral and literate cultures that span late imperial and Republican China. The definition of region, in Wan’s view, should not be predetermined by any geographical, economic, administrative, or linguistic frameworks; instead, she employs a flexible, connect-the-dots methodology that adjusts the frame of reference according to primary sources. Along the way, “region” carries varying connotations from extrinsic conditions to intrinsic value, from the location of the print to the locale of a story, and from the range of knowledge transfer to the popularization of moral imagination. As a result, Wan opens up new possibilities of rendering the regional, offering a heterogeneous constellation of implications rather than a pigeonholed perspective. Chapter 1 ponders how regional drum ballads are by offering parameters such as site of publication, scope of circulation, vehicle of communication, and intended audience. It also introduces the central subject matter of the ensuing chapters: the legends of Judge Shi and Judge Liu, heroes who were modeled on the real Qing-Dynasty officials Shi Shilun 施世綸 (1659–1722) and Liu Yong 劉墉 (1720–1805). By comparing three inventories of ballad collections and using publication data, Wan makes a strong case that, excepting the case of Shanghai, drum ballads in general and those on the two judges in particular were produced and circulated in North China. Differences or correspondences between versions of the same story in terms of wording and layout are considerable.While disparity between","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42179901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nightmares, Daydreams, and Sleeplessness: Nighttime Performances and the Uneven End of Early Modernity in China","authors":"A. Goldman","doi":"10.1353/cop.2022.a873826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2022.a873826","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay uses nighttime theatricals and lighting as indices to understand the transition from early modernity to modernity in China. It draws upon textual and visual evidence of nighttime performance in China before the modern era to explore the ways in which the association of theatrical spectacle with night varied by class, locale, and gender; it further plots nighttime versus daytime performance along the continuum from ritual to entertainment opera. Theater in the countryside tended toward ritual performance at night for mixed-gender villagers, whereas in urban centers it was mostly about entertainment held during daylight hours for elite male audiences, at least before the advent of gas and electric lighting. Whether performed by day or night, theater in early modern China expiated nightmares and indulged daydreams, and—as it entered the modern era—more than ever fostered a world of perpetual sleeplessness.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44038482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Early Phonograph Records and Music Scores of Jingju: Materialization, Textualization, and Oral Transmission of Tan Xinpei's Arias","authors":"Hai Zhen","doi":"10.1353/cop.2022.a873827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2022.a873827","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Tan Xinpei 譚鑫培 (1847–1917) is an era-defining figure in the history of Jingju (Peking Opera) and also one of the first generation of Jingju actors who recorded arias, in 1907 and 1912. Widely sung during his lifetime, his arias were notated and published as music scores after his death. The recordings and notated scores (with commentary) are the subject of this paper, which explores their relationship to Tan's \"flexible singing\" on stage and their role in the dissemination and transmission of Tan's singing style to this day.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49338586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Special Issue Honoring David L. Rolston, Part II","authors":"C. Swatek","doi":"10.1353/cop.2022.a873825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2022.a873825","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43167817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Human Doors, Ghost Doors: Entrances and Exits in Qing Court Theater","authors":"Judith T. Zeitlin","doi":"10.1353/cop.2022.a873828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2022.a873828","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The control of exits and entrances may be fundamental to theater the world over, but as Zhou Yibai observed long ago, the absolute weight placed on the entrances and exits of actors to construct the stage is of paramount importance in Chinese traditional drama. This essay examines how stage space was reconfigured in Qing court \"grand opera\" through major changes in the uses of exits and entrances, as laid out in unprecedented detail in stage directions included in the lengthy scripts. In particular, this essay focuses on Zhang Zhao's Golden Standard for Exhortation to Virtue (Quanshan jinke 勸善金科) from the early years of the Qianlong emperor's reign (1740 or 1741). As the first of the Qing grand operas to be composed and printed, The Golden Standard helped shape all subsequent grand opera scripts, while the success of its performance led to the construction of permanent three-tiered stages in Qing palaces, two of which are still extant today. The Golden Standard is also especially valuable as an intermediate work between the way exits and entrances are handled in the printed play texts of monumental chuanqi like The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭) and The Palace of Lasting Life (Changsheng dian 長生殿) and in the grand opera genre as a whole. Finally, since The Golden Standard is a play that enacts the Buddhist story of Mulian rescuing his mother from hell, ghosts and the underworld play a disproportionately large role in the action. As I argue, it is particularly in the reconceiving of the ontological and spatial relationship between ghosts and the stage that Zhang Zhao's innovations were at their most radical.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42876608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}