The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama
ISBN: 9780231537346
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Chinese drama -- Yuan dynasty 1260–1368 -- Translations into English;

This anthology features translations of ten seminal plays written during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), a period considered the golden age of Chinese theater. By turns lyrical and earthy, sentimental and ironic, Yuan drama spans a broad emotional, linguistic, and stylistic range. Combining sung arias with declaimed verses and doggerels, dialogues and mime, and jokes and acrobatic feats, Yuan drama formed a vital part of China's culture of performance and entertainment in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

To date, few Yuan-dynasty plays have been translated into English. Well-known translators and scholars have supervised the making of this collection and add a short description to each play. A general introduction situates all selections within their cultural and historical contexts.


C. T. Hsia (1921-2013) is professor emeritus of Chinese at Columbia University. His books include The Classic Chinese Novel and A History of Modern Chinese Fiction . He is also the coeditor, with Joseph S. M. Lau and Leo O. Lee, of Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919-1949 .

Wai-Yee Li is professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature ; The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography ; and Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature . She is also the translator, with Stephen Durrant and David Schaberg, of Zuozhuan .

George Kao (1912-2008) was a Chinese American author, translator, and journalist who served as director of the West Coast office of China's Government Information Office and as editor in chief of the Chinese Press.
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