Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines how Chinese modern drama, or huaju, provided intellectual play-makers a vital but tension-ridden venue to (re)produce forms of “self” as “enlighteners” to the masses and “participatory citizens” of the nation for the task of building a modern China by (re)defining social norms within the huaju “stage.” I present a three-fold understanding of “play-making” that incorporates its textual, performative/theatrical, and meta-theatrical senses while dealing with specific huaju plays that were written and staged in Columbus, Ohio (Chapter 1), Shanghai and Ding County (Chapter 2), Jiang'an (Chapter 3), and Chongqing (Chapter 4). My narrative focuses on four cosmopolitan dramatists—Hong Shen (1894-1955), Xiong Foxi (1900-1965), Yu Shangyuan (1897-1970), and Xia Yan (1900-1995)—while they mobilized self and huaju against the backdrop of successive wars and (re)constructions on domestic and global scales in the first half of the 20th century. I demonstrate how play-making, seen and practiced as a “democratic institution,” attempted to form a “unity” incorporating the metropolitan masses, a rural base for the Mass Education Movement, and shelters for war refugees during the Second Sino-Japanese War. My three-fold approach to play-making problematizes understandings of huaju in extant scholarship and significantly revises the deficient discourse of modern Chinese theatre. Huaju has been designated in both China and theatre studies as being oriented toward intellectuals and informed by “Western modernity,” particularly so during the genre's formative phase in the 1920s. Although such an identity earned for huaju the glory of being an ideal modern cultural form and a social-educational frontier for May Fourth intellectuals, it also rendered huaju an “undesirable other” in the 1990s when scholarly attention shifted from elite May Fourth culture to popular culture and alternative modernities. Today, while “traditional” and popular cultural forms ha (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kirk Denton (Advisor); Patricia Sieber (Committee Member); Christopher Reed (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Studies; History; Literature; Performing Arts; Theater