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Primary source material This book, from the series Primary Sources: Historical Books of the World (Asia and Far East Collection), represents an important historical artifact on Asian history and culture. Its contents come from the legions of academic literature and research on the subject produced over the last several hundred years. Covered within is a discussion drawn from many areas of study and research on the subject. From analyses of the varied geography that encompasses the Asian contine...

Set in 1930s India, the testament of Bakhar, a latrine cleaner, illuminates attitudes towards the lowest caste at a time of tremendous political upheaval.

The popular stages of Indonesia offer a window to inter-ethnic cultural obsessions and signs of participation in global trends. Volume 1 of the Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama brings together representative plays from the 1890s until the 1960s. It includes examples from the diverse genres that make up Indonesian popular theater: komedi stambul, a form of musical theater initially dedicated to the Arabian Nights; opera derma or Chinese-Indonesian 'charity opera'; and tonil, theatre in the mo...

Subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) services are available on many online video-streaming platforms (VSPs) in China, such as iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video, backed by Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent groups (BAT), respectively. The video content on these platforms can be the same shows as those broadcasted on national or provincial television stations or originally produced and exclusively streamed on the VSP. Meanwhile, VSPs purchase the distribution rights of foreign films and television series to e...

Noh plays live on as a magnificent artistic heritage handed down from the high culture of medieval Japan. Among the major types of Japanese drama, the No, which is often called the classical theatre of Japan, has had perhaps the greatest attraction for the West. Introduced to Europe and America through the translations of Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound, it found an ardent admirer in William Butler Yeats, who described it as a form of drama 'distinguished, indirect, and symbolic' and created plays i...

Mistress & Maid, one of the greatest tragedies of Chinese drama, is here available for the first time in English. Acclaimed translator Cyril Birch presents the bittersweet tale of Bella, daughter of the Wang family, her maid Petal, and the young scholar Shen Chun. After her father reneges on her marital pact, Bella refuses to renounce her love for Shen, with whom she has vowed to share "in life one room, in death one tomb." The subversion of both conventional morality and the arranged marriage t...

Fragrant tropical fl owers, opulent batik fabrics, magnificent bronze gamelanorchestras, and, of course, aromatic coff ee. Such are the exotic images of Java, Indonesia's most densely populated island, that have hovered at the periphery of North American imaginations for generations. Through close readings of the careers of four "javaphiles" - individuals who embraced Javanese performing arts in their own quests for a sense of belonging - Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and...

Written in 1857, Ramnabami-Natak was the first modern Assamese play on a secular theme. The playwright, Gunabhiram Barua, drew upon certain liberal intellectual trends in contemporary Bengal to write extensively on women's education, child marriage, and polygamy.

Set in present day Ahmedababd, the play explores the conflict that exists in a marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim against the backdrop of the explosive communal politics of India. "One of the most mesmerizing and absorbing 80 minutes I have spent in the theatre."--"Redditch Observer"

The contributors - two Slavicists, a musicologist and an art historian - offer a detailed exploration of the ballet, Petrushka, which premiered in Russia in 1911 and became one of the most important and influential theatrical works of the modernist period.