Professor Patricia Sieber will examine different early modern editions of The Story of the Western Wing in an effort to tease out how images in drama publications not only altered the reading experience of such texts, but also changed the performative enactment of theatrical forms. Thus rather treating such images as mere “illustrations,” the talk seeks to show that the appearance of images in theater-related texts was a transformative moment for the history of the book and for the culture of theater alike.

About the speaker:

Patricia Sieber is an Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on premodern Chinese drama and fiction, the history of the book, and translation studies. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000 and is currently the lead editor for How To Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology. She has given talks in the US, Europe, Russia, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and her work has appeared in English, Chinese, and German.