This book studies a cluster of Brecht’s works, including The Good Person of Szechwan, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Schweyk in the Second World War, his adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and Stories of Mr. Keuner, through the lens of classical Chinese philosophy as espoused by Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Mozi, Xunzi, Guanzi, and others, zooming in on the dynamic, dialectical, and high-stakes tensions between ethics and survival in a world of absurdity torn by existential crises. More specifically, this book studies the selected Brechtian works as parables of ethics and survival that embody and espouse Brecht’s sociopolitical, ethical, and aesthetic ideologies shaped by his essentially Marxist worldviews as well as his exposure to classical Chinese culture, philosophy and theatrical arts, and in doing so will contribute meaningfully to the fields of comparative drama/theatre studies, comparative literature studies, intercultural studies, and performance studies.

Wei Zhang received her PhD in Comparative Theatre from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (2018). She also holds a PhD from Shanghai Theatre Academy (2007). She was a visiting scholar in the Department of World Arts and Culture at UCLA (2009–2010), and senior research scholar at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in Germany (2023-2024). She is the author of Chinese Adaptations of Brecht: Appropriation and Intertextuality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Performance Across Chinese Borders (2024), and two other books on pertinent topics. Her research has been published in Theatre Research International, Asian Theatre Journal, Philosophy and Literature, Comparative Drama, Classical Receptions Journal, The Brecht Yearbook, and many other journals. She is Professor at Hangzhou Normal University, China.