ABSTRACT
In Chinese theater history, the nineteenth century was a period of change, uncertainty, and instability. The highly literary kunqu (kun opera)1 continued to decline in popularity while numerous local dramatic forms were flourishing.2
The multiplication of regional voices from the common people, along with various newly imported Western artistic forms, enriched traditional theatrical expression, but also threatened to undo traditional cultural boundaries. At this moment of crisis, one type of local drama, a genre that I refer to as “bordercrossing drama,” was especially important in popular reconsiderations of China’s frontiers. By examining the new borders of ethnicity, gender, geography, and nation created in late Qing local drama and fiction, I intend to discuss how nineteenth-century writers challenged and remade the borders that had supported the border-crossing genre in earlier ages, and to investigate how the newly defined borders reflected local senses of identity in an era of disintegration and multiplication, destruction and reinvention.
