-PDF Download- When True Love Came To China EBOOK

When True Love Came to China

Author: Lynn Pan

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2015-11-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 9888208802

The Guardian's Best Books of 2015 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 favour of free individual choice, monogamy and a Western model of romantic love. ‘This book, Lynn Pan’s best to date, adds a wonderful new angle by encouraging us, via comparison, to better appreciate how unusual, even in some ways exotic, a part of the Western past we take for granted, as though it were natural, actually is. While the reader will learn a great deal about Chinese literary and cultural traditions from this book, if read with an open mind the Western reader may end up rethinking things about his or her tradition just as deeply.’ —Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California at Irvine ‘Nobody writes about China quite as brilliantly as Lynn Pan, who in this new, illuminating work on love showcases her trademark erudition entwined with a novelist’s sensibility. Pan’s rare skill makes the book a treat from start to finish; a sumptuous, deft and moving analysis of China’s relationship with love.’ —Mishi Saran, author of Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang and The Other Side of Light

When True Love Came to China

Author: Lynn Pan

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 9789888313426

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Sexuality in China

Author: Howard Chiang

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2018-06-15

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0295743484

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What was sex like in China, from imperial times through the post-Mao era? The answer depends, of course, on who was having sex, where they were located in time and place, and what kind of familial, social, and political structures they participated in. This collection offers a variety of perspectives by addressing diverse topics such as polygamy, pornography, free love, eugenics, sexology, crimes of passion, homosexuality, intersexuality, transsexuality, masculine anxiety, sex work, and HIV/AIDS. Following a loose chronological sequence, the chapters examine revealing historical moments in which human desire and power dynamics came into play. Collectively, the contributors undertake a necessary historiographic intervention by reconsidering Western categorizations and exploring Chinese understandings of sexuality and erotic orientation.

The Chinese Love Story from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century

Author: Alister D. Inglis

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2023-04-01

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1438492561

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Love stories formed a major part of the classical short story genre in China from as early as the eighth century, when men of letters began to write about romantic encounters. In later centuries, such stories provided inspiration for several new literary genres. While much scholarly attention has been focused on the short story of both the medieval and late imperial eras, comparatively little work has been attempted on the interim stage, the Song and Yuan dynasties, which spanned some five hundred years from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. Yet this was a crucial developmental period for many forms of narrative literature—so much so that any understanding of late imperial narrative should be informed by the earlier tradition. The first study of its kind in English, The Chinese Love Story from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century traces the development of the love story throughout this important yet overlooked era. Using Tang dynasty stories as a point of comparison, Alister D. Inglis examines and appraises key new themes, paying special attention to period hallmarks, gender portrayal, and textuality. Inglis demonstrates that, contrary to received scholarly wisdom, this was a highly innovative period during which writers and storytellers laid a fertile foundation for the literature of late imperial China.

China Pluperfect I

Author: Frank Vigneron

Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press

Published: 2022-07-01

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9882372465

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Initially based on a comparative study of Chinese and Euro-American art theory in the 18th and 19th centuries, this book examines how both cultures looked at their own past and their outside, i.e. what was construed as not belonging to their own cultural sphere, and how they devised new ways of adapting them into evolving cultural constructs. While the 17th century was still a time when the epistemological backgrounds of both civilizations were so profoundly different that nearly no dialogue was possible, the 18th century saw the emergence in both places of profound changes that would get them close enough to create the conditions for the beginning of a conversation. First quite superficial and taking shape mostly in the decorative arts, this process of rapprochement, while remaining chaotic and unpredictable, led to wider and more profound zones of contact throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. Through the reinterpretations of each other’s cultural creations, these zones of contact grew wider as the conditions for globalization became more and more prevalent. Frank Vigneron observes and explores these changes through texts and the visual arts to reveal how these two civilizations, while keeping their own characteristics, managed to develop fruitful dialogues and create deeply intertwined cultures. As an example, the final chapter looks at contemporary Chinese calligraphy as an art that, even though it has no equivalent in Euro-America, successfully integrated cross-cultural theoretical elements, thus exemplifying how past and outside can combine into new artistic constructs.

Romance in Post-Socialist Chinese Television

Author: Huike Wen

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-07-13

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 3030477290

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book is about how the representations of romantic love in television reflect the change and the dilemma of the dominant values in post-socialist Chinese mainstream culture. These values mainly center on the impact of individualism, consumerism, capitalism, and neoliberalism, often referred to as western culture, on the perception of romantic love and self-realization in China. The book focuses on how romantic love, which plays a vital role in China’s ideologically highly restricted social environment by empowering people with individual choice, change, and social mobility, must struggle and compromise with the reality, specifically the values and problems emerging in a transitional China. The book also examines how the representation of romantic love celebrates ideals—individual freedom, passion, and gender equality—and promises changes based on individual diligence and talent while simultaneously obstructing the fulfillment of these ideals.

Handbook on the Family and Marriage in China

Author: Xiaowei Zang

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2017-12-29

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1785368192

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This Handbook advances research on the family and marriage in China by providing readers with a multidisciplinary and multifaceted coverage of major issues in one single volume. It addresses the major conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues of marriage and family in China and offers critical reflections on both the history and likely progression of the field.

Strangers in the Family

Author: Guo-Quan Seng

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1501772538

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In Strangers in the Family, Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban Java. Departing from male-centered narratives of Ooverseas Chinese communities, Strangers in the Family tells the history of community- formation from the perspective of women who were subordinate to, and alienated from, full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, Seng showcases women's moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, this book explores Asian-centered inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women's place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.

The Global White Snake

Author: Liang Luo

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2021-08-09

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0472038605

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Tracing the history and adaptation of one of China's foundational texts

Super Sad True Love Story

Author: Gary Shteyngart

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2010-07-27

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 067960359X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • The Seattle Times • O: The Oprah Magazine • Maureen Corrigan, NPR • Salon • Slate • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Charlotte Observer • The Globe and Mail • Vancouver Sun • Montreal Gazette • Kirkus Reviews In the near future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Then Lenny Abramov, son of an Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of “printed, bound media artifacts” (aka books), meets Eunice Park, an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart?