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Translational Stages: Chinese Theatrical Modernism, Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Translation in relation to theater is understudied and seldom theorized. This dissertation shows that connecting the two practices through historical examples promotes new ways of looking at what is conventionally called intercultural theater. By translation in relation to theater, I refer to the complex and related processes of the interlingual translation of scripts, the intersemiotic translation of script to stage, and the intrasemiotic translation between theatrical forms. The Chinese genre of theater known as huaju 话剧 in the decades studied here, the 1910s to 1930s, has been described as borrowed from the Western naturalist or realist stage, but I recast …