In seventeenth-century China, as formerly disparate social
spheres grew closer, the theater began to occupy an important
ideological niche among traditional cultural elites. As the newly
rich and the newly educated challenged the position of older
elites, notions of performance and spectatorship came to animate
diverse aspects of literati cultural production. The goal of
"Worldly Stage" is to show how the theater acquired this figurative
power.
Conceptions of theatrical spectatorship, Sophie Volpp argues,
helped shape a discourse on social spectatorship that suggested how
a discerning person might evaluate the performance of status. The
exploration of theatricality allowed authors to discuss the
emerging middle elite's precarious grasp of symbolic capital and
the cultural past. That social roles resembled theatrical roles
illuminated the excesses of the socially aspiring and the success
of the undeserving. The transience of the world and the vanity of
reputation had long informed the Chinese conception of
theatricality. But in the seventeenth century, these notions
acquired a new verbalization. That theatrical spectatorship
provided a model for how one viewed the world was an old idea. What
was new was that theatrical models of spectatorship were now
applied to the contemporary urban social spectacle in which the
theater itself was deeply implicated.
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