Description du projet
Découverte du théâtre de cour chinois
Un élément important de l’histoire du théâtre chinois, le théâtre de cour, reste inconnu et négligé dans la culture littéraire et matérielle. Avec un vaste corpus de plus de 20 000 textes anonymes, le riche contenu du théâtre de cour chinois n’attend plus que d’être découvert, compris et étudié. Un cadre spécial est nécessaire pour analyser ce sujet complexe. En se concentrant sur la période 1600-1800, le projet TEXTCOURT financé par l’UE développera une archive numérique des textes du théâtre de cour pour les relier à leurs contextes locaux et mondiaux. Le projet permettra de réaliser des études textuelles du théâtre de cour chinois, de publier des recherches et de réaliser une anthologie de traductions en anglais. Il contribuera à la compréhension du rôle du théâtre de cour chinois dans les cultures des cours mondiales.
Objectif
Court theater was a core part of Chinese court and performance culture for centuries, yet its texts have never been amply studied. There are several reasons for this: their low status in Chinese literary history as ‘authorless’ performer’s texts; the vast (20,000+) quantity of texts and the difficulty of accessing them; and the lack of an existing analytic framework to study anonymous Chinese performance texts on such a large scale. Chinese court drama thus remains a ‘closed’ textual world, neglected in literary history. The lacuna is especially glaring given the quantity and richness of the extant texts: performance practices and other aspects of material culture are preserved alongside dramatic content. Furthermore, court theater was among the most ‘outward facing’ of all Chinese genres, shown to foreign ambassadors. Many visitors recorded what was often their only impression of Chinese theater culture.
Chinese court theater thus contains a complex series of closed, disjointed textual worlds. To re-link these textual worlds, this project will build the first digital archive of court drama scripts and related foreign records. Based on this resource, the project will trace internal links between scripts in the textual web of court drama; draw external links to individuals, occasions, and artefacts; and consider cross-cultural links to situate Chinese court drama in its global context.
The project will produce the first textual studies of Chinese court drama, including a court drama textual database, a series of monographs and publications on extended text-based research topics, and an anthology of English translations for the general reader. These outputs will remedy the lack of textual studies on Chinese court drama, contributing towards our understanding of Chinese theater history and world court cultures. The methodology the project develops to study a large corpus of authorless texts could be applied to other Chinese genres such as folk tales and dialect songs.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitution d’accueil
OX1 2JD Oxford
Royaume-Uni