Chinese Shadow Theatre

Chinese shadow theatre, a rare and ancient art from combining exquisite carvings with painting, music, singing, performance, and literature, owes its preservation to a non-elite, peripheral, and silent majority. In Chinese Shadow Theatre Fan Pen Li Chen documents and corrects misconceptions about this once-popular art form. Drawing on extensive research and fieldwork, she argues that these plays served a mainly religious function during the Qing dynasty and that the appeal of women warrior characters reflected the lower classes' high tolerance for the unorthodox and subversive. Chen examines the relationship between historical and fictional women warriors and those in military romances and shadow plays to demonstrate the significance of both printed works and oral transmission in the diffusion of popular culture. By linking traditional folk theatre to recent scholarship on drama, popular religion, and popular culture she shows that is a subject for serious academic study.