Winner IBP 2011 Colleagues’ Choice Award

Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares. Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. Columbia University Press, 2009.

The Chinese appreciation of Beethoven is well known: of Shakespeare, less so. Chinese Shakespeares is an original and engaging study of the Chinese adoption of the English languages’s greatest playwright. This work may be enjoyed in its own right, but is also a study of both Chinese cultural engagement with the West and of cross-cultural communication in theatre and film. Shakespeare’s works largely escaped a colonial context in their early manifestations in China, and were often imbued with localised meanings that enabled their partial indigenisation. Shakespeare continues to be interpreted and reinterpreted in China for both local and global audiences and Huang’s study of its various manifestations and meanings, its translations and its performaces, will be the standard text in the field for years to come. We are pleased to award the IBP Colleagues’ Choice Award for a study which draws on a wide range of sources, and is a significant contribution to literary studies, cultural history, and studies of globalisation.