When true love came to China / Lynn Pan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pan, Lynn, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Love--China.

Love.

Love in literature.

National characteristics, Chinese.

China--Social life and customs.

China.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (335 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Hong Kong : HKU Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

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' regardless 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 favor of free individual choice, monogamy and a Western model of romantic love.

Contents:

1. Love's entree

2. Confucius and Freud

3. Love in the western world

4. Keywords

5. Two great works on love

6. The Camellia lady

7. Joan Haste and romantic fiction

8. The clump

9. Two ways of escape

10. Faust, Werther, Salome

11. Ellen Key

12. One and only

13. Looking for love : Yu Dafu

14. Exalting love : Xu Zhimo

15. Love betrayed : Eileen Chang

16. Love's decline and fall

17. Afterthoughts.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed March 4, 2016).

ISBN:

9789888313426

9888313428

OCLC:

940922159