Revolution of the Heart A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 [Hardcover]

This book is an engagingly written critical genealogy of the idea of love in modern Chinese literature, thought, and popular culture. It examines a wide range of texts, including literary, historical, philosophical, anthropological, and popular cultural genres from the late imperial period to the beginning of the socialist era. It traces the process by which love became an all-pervasive subject of representation and discourse, as well as a common language in which modern notions of self, gender, family, sexuality, and nation were imagined and contested.Winner of the Association for Asian Studies 2009 Joseph Levenson Book Prize for the best English-language academic book on post-1900 China Haiyan Lee's new book is a solid, carefully structured and thoughtfully argued theoretical account of the centrality of emotion in the transformation of modernity and the construction of the modern self in China from 1900 to 1950. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book encompasses literature, modern social history and cultural studies Haiyan Lee's book is an ambitious and interesting project, to be lauded for the ways it synthesizes complex and contentious theoretical issues. What I find most impressive about this study is the wealth of readings Lee offers.Revolution of the Heartis a very well-researched book, and Lee's thesis is presented clearly, forcefully, and within well-constructed literary and critical contexts. Haiyan Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University.An engagingly written critical genealogy of love in modern Chinese literature, thought, and popular culture. Revolution of the Heartbegins weeping, in the late Qing, and ends wailing, roughly a century later. In the pages between, Haiyan Lee makes a powerful argument for the centrality of feelingespecially romantic loveto the imagination of the nation, reform, and revolution in twentieth-century China. I fully recommend Revolution oflÓ_