Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9789004714328)

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.

Author: Yinghui Wu
ISBN-10: 9004714324
ISBN-13: 9789004714328
Publisher: Brill
Language: English
Published: 10/16/2025
Pages: 292
Format: Hardcover