When true love came to China / Lynn Pan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pan, Lynn, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Love--China.

Love.

National characteristics, Chinese.

China--Social life and customs.

China.

Manners and customs.

Physical Description:

325 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press, [2016]

Summary:

"Most people suppose that the whole world knows what it is to love; that romantic love is universal, quintessentially human. Such a supposition has to be able to meet three challenges. It has to justify its underlying assumption that all cultures mean the same thing by the word 'love' regarless of language. It has to engage with the scholarly debate on whether or not romantic love was invented in Europe and is uniquely Western. And it must be able to explain why early twentieth-century Chinese writers claimed that they had never known true love, or love by modern Western standards. By addressing these three challenges through a literary, historical, philosophical, biographical and above all comparative approach, this highly original work shows how love's profile in China shifted with the rejection of arranged marriages and concubinage in favour of free individual choice, monogamy and a Western model of romantic love." --back cover.

Contents:

Love's entrée

Confucius and Freud

Love in the Western world

Keywords

Two great works on love

The Camellia Lady

Joan Haste and romantic fiction

The clump

Two ways of escape

Faust, Werther, Salome

Ellen Key

One and only

Looking for love: Yu Dafu

Exalting love: Xu Zhimo

Love betrayed: Eileen Chang

Love's decline and fall

Afterthoughts.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-317) and index.

ISBN:

9888208802

9789888208807

OCLC:

926820660