The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear - by Nan Z Da Hardcover

About the Book

"Nan Z. Da, who immigrated to the United States from China as a child, analyzes Shakespeare's King Lear as a way to understand her family's experience in China during and after the Cultural Revolution"--

Book Synopsis

A compelling new reading of The Tragedy of King Lear that finds parallels in twentieth-century Chinese history

At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters' professions of love, but portions it out before hearing all of their answers. For Nan Da, this opening scene sparks a reckoning between The Tragedy of King Lear, one of the cruelest and most confounding stories in literature, and the tragedy of Maoist and post-Maoist China. Da, who emigrated from China to the United States as a child in the 1990s, brings Shakespeare's tragedy to life on its own terms, addressing the concerns it reflects over the transition from Elizabeth I to James I with a fearsome sense of what would soon come to pass. At the same time, she uses the play as a lens to revisit the world of Maoist China--what it did to people, and what it did to storytelling.

Blending literary analysis and personal history, Da begins in her childhood during Deng Xiaoping's Opening and Reform, then moves back and forth between Lear and China. In her powerful reading, the unfinished business of Maoism and other elements of Chinese thought and culture--from Confucianism to the spectacles of Peking Opera--help elucidate the choices Shakespeare made in constructing Lear and the unbearable confusions he left behind.

Review Quotes

"Da's new book . . . [serves] as axiom, intuition, experimental hypothesis, and knowing provocation. . . . The Chinese Tragedy of "King Lear" is not about how King Lear became a Chinese play; it is about why Da instinctively knew that it had been one all along."---Catherine Nicholson, New York Review of Books

"Compelling and enjoyable."---Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books

"An ambitious blend of literary criticism and political analysis. . . . Da's grasp of China's 20^th century history demonstrates how hauntingly Shakespeare prefigures the horrors unleashed by Mao's coercive authority."---Ron Charles, Washington Post

About the Author

Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounters: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange.