HARVARD-YENCHING INSTITUTE MONOGRAPH SERIES
Cover: The Cornucopian Stage: Performing Commerce in Early Modern China, from Harvard University PressCover: The Cornucopian Stage in HARDCOVER

Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 140

The Cornucopian Stage

Performing Commerce in Early Modern China

Product Details

HARDCOVER

$49.95 • £43.95 • €45.95

ISBN 9780674293755

Publication Date: 09/05/2023

Text

278 pages

6 x 9 inches

8 color illus., 2 maps

Harvard University Asia Center > Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series

World

Add to Cart

Media Requests:

Related Subjects

The long seventeenth century in China was a period of tremendous commercial expansion, and no literary genre was better equipped to articulate its possibilities than southern drama. As a form and a practice, southern drama was in the business of world-building—both in its structural imperative to depict and reconcile the social whole and in its creation of entire economies dependent on its publication and performance. However, the early modern commercial world repelled rather than engaged most playwrights, who consigned its totems—the merchant and his money—to the margins as sources of political suspicion and cultural anxiety.

In The Cornucopian Stage, Ariel Fox examines a body of influential yet understudied plays by a circle of Suzhou playwrights who enlisted the theatrical imaginary to very different ends. In plays about long-distance traders and small-time peddlers, impossible bargains and broken contracts, strings of cash and storehouses of silver, the Suzhou circle placed commercial forms not only at center stage but at the center of a new world coming into being. Here, Fox argues, the economic character of early modern selfhood is recast as fundamentally productive—as the basis for new subject positions, new kinds of communities, and new modes of art.

Recent News

Black lives matter. Black voices matter. A statement from HUP »

From Our Blog

Jacket: Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, by Peter Wilson, from Harvard University Press

A Lesson in German Military History with Peter Wilson

In his landmark book Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, acclaimed historian Peter H. Wilson offers a masterful reappraisal of German militarism and warfighting over the last five centuries, leading to the rise of Prussia and the world wars. Below, Wilson answers our questions about this complex history,