WHEN TRUE LOVE CAME TO CHINA

Book ID/图书代码： 06435016B87030

English Summary/英文概要： 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.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 大多数人认为全世界都知道什么是爱——浪漫的爱情是普遍的、典型的人类情感。但这样的假设必须经得起三个挑战：它必须证明其基本假设，即所有文化对所有语言中的“爱”这个字的定义都是一样的；它必须经过学术辩论，确定浪漫爱情是否在欧洲发明的，并且是西方所独有的；它必须解释为什么20世纪早期的中国作家会声称从来不知真爱为何物，也不知道现代西方对爱的标准。这部极具原创性的作品通过文学、历史、哲学、传记、比较的方法揭示了在中国，爱是如何从反对包办婚姻和纳妾向支持自由选择、一夫一妻、西方浪漫爱情模式转变的。（LYR）

Awards/获奖情况：本书是Lynn Pan迄今为止最好的作品。通过比较，从一个全新的角度鼓励我们发现那些被我们认为是理所当然的过去西方的某一部分是多么地非凡。读者会通过本书了解大量有关中国文学和文化传统的知识，但如果怀着开放的心态阅读本书，西方读者还会因此重新深入思考自己的传统。——Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom，历史教授

没有人能够像Lynn Pan这样机智地描写中国。在这部有关爱的启发性作品之中，她将标志性的博学和小说家的感性结合在了一起。她罕见的技法使这本书读来非常享受——对中国与爱的关系进行了丰富、机智、令人动容的分析。——Mishi Saran，作家

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 Lynn Pan is one of the great social historians of early 20th-century China, as attuned to the subterranean life of private emotions as to the meaning of large tumultuous events. Her new book, When True Love Came to China, is a rich and gripping account of how the first generation of modern Chinese intellectuals and writers discovered the pleasures - and sufferings - of romantic love. -- Pankaj Mishra Guardian

‘Th is 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.’ —Jeff rey N. Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California at Irvine

The Guardian, Saturday 28 November 2015
Chosen by Mishra Pankaj as one of the best books of 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2015/nov/28/best-books-of-2015-part-one#row_20

Asian Review of Books, 12 December 2015
http://www.historic-shanghai.com/historic-shanghais-best-books-of-2015/

Asian Review of Books, 12 December 2015
http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/pages/?ID=2471