Opera Aficionados and Guides to Boy Actresses
Opera Aficionados and Guides to Boy Actresses
This chapter presents a literary analysis of a subgenre of writings known as “flower registers” (huapu). It describes how allusions to pain enabled Qing theater enthusiasts to position themselves in debates about taste and distinction. The Qing-dynasty huapu in the tradition of evaluative biographies of entertainers that dates from Sun Qi's late ninth-century Chronicles of the Northern Quarter is also reviewed. The huapu was a relative latecomer to a long tradition of connoisseurship texts that claimed to rank and evaluate things and people. It always offered the lao dou as a figure against which the connoisseur-author constantly measured himself. The exclusivity of the connoisseur's aesthetic and social vision could only be fully articulated against a backdrop of vulgarity—whether the taste of the lao dou, the taste of merchants, or, more broadly, the “taste of the times”.
Keywords: flower registers, huapu, pain, Qing theater, Qing-dynasty, Chronicles of the Northern Quarter, connoisseurship, lao dou, connoisseur
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