Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China

摘要

Anne McLaren has given us an extraordinary find: 1,022 thoughtfully translated and sensibly analysed lines of a cycle of bridal laments from a Shanghai regional repertoire current in the 1920s. Unlike the corpus of Pearl River delta bridal laments, which were literary in flavour - their performers labelled them "abstruse" - with set forms and complex references to written characters, these Nanhui performances were "highly colloquial and irregular."