Reading the Right Text: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama

by Xiaomei Chen (Editor)

Reading the Right Text introduces six new plays from contemporary China, five of which are translated here into English for the first time. Chosen from a wide variety of well-received dramas of the period, each play represents the traditions and changes in a particular regional theater, proletarian theater, women's theater, history plays, and experimental theater. Xiaomei Chen's wide-ranging and perceptive introduction locates the plays in the political and cultural history of modern China to demonstrate the interrelationship between theater, history, society, and everyday experience. She highlights the origin and development of the different sub-genres and outlines critical approaches from numerous fields, including gender studies, performance studies, subaltern studies, and comparative cultural studies.

Quite apart from their importance as theater, these plays are crucial for a fully rounded understanding of the cultural dynamics involved in the transition from Maoist to post-Mao China, from socialist realist drama to the post-socialist response to a market economy and a society in flux.

480 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2003

About the author

Professor Xiaomei Chen loves to teach Chinese films that she grew up with in the People’s Republic of China. Her Chinese 101 is a popular course covering classics from the silent film era to the twentieth-first century. Her research areas include modern Chinese literature and culture, performance studies, and visual cultural studies, which can be examined through the critical analysis of films.

Her publications include Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford, 1995, second and expanded edition, 2002), Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Culture in Contemporary China (Haiwaii UP, 2002), and other edited and co-edited volumes on visual culture, East-West comparative performance studies, and Chinese drama in English translation.

Professor Chen received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University.

(from http://arts.ucdavis.edu/faculty-profi...)