内容简介

In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values.

It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.

作品目录

contents

list of illustrations

reign periods of the ming and qing dynasties

overture

part one audience and actors

1 opera aficionados and guides to boy actresses

the texts

the connoisseurs

the Lao Dou and other patrons

conclusion

part two venues and genres

2 metropolitan operas, border crossing and the state

the playhouse

the temple fair

the salon

conclusion

3 musical gentre, opera hierachy and court patronage

Yabu and Huabu

court patronage and regulation to circa 1860

genre delineation and the opera marketplace

court patronage and regulation after 1860

conclusion

part three social melodrama and the sexing of political complaint

the garden of Turquoise and Jade and its sources

garden and the ethics of early Qing

Suzhou playwright

garden on the commercial stage

conclusion

5 s*ex versus violence in "I, sister in law" operas

the stories

from page to stage

Kunju performances in context

eighteenth century court appropriation of "I, sister in law" operas

violence and the reinstantiation of moral order in the Pihuang tradition

conclusion

CODA

APPENDICES

LIST OF CHARACTERS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX