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The Bard in East Asia

Exploring the world of non-Anglophone Shakespeare
by
August 2021, no. 434

Shakespeare and East Asia by Alexa Alice Joubin

Oxford University Press, £16.99 pb, 272 pp

The Bard in East Asia

Exploring the world of non-Anglophone Shakespeare
by
August 2021, no. 434
Production of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jō), 1956 (Wikimedia Commons)
Production of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jō), 1956 (Wikimedia Commons)

Shakespeare and East Asia is one of the latest titles released in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. Edited by Stanley Wells and Peter Holland, the Oxford University Press series is pitched at the elusive general reader who is seeking a primer on one of the many topics proliferating within the bustling industry of Shakespeare studies. Written by one of the directors of the MIT Global Shakespeares Archive, this book invites readers to think about the significance of Shakespeare’s continuing influence on cultural production in the Far East, and how Asian adaptations of his corpus participate in creating a contested image of Asia for audiences both in the region and in the Anglophone West. Assembling a varied body of cinematic and theatrical reworkings of Shakespeare from countries like Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Joubin tells a story about Asian Shakespeares that is also a story about how a particular region has negotiated the imperatives of globalisation and the tacit anglicising effects of global culture.

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