Citation

Goodman B. Nan Nu 2009; 11(2): 270-301.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Brill Academic Publishers)

DOI

10.1163/138768009X12586661923063

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Recent attention to the modern history of emotion in China has traced multiple and shifting discourses. The New Culture Movement that competed with "butterfly fiction" in the first decade of China's new Republic championed an autonomous form of individual personhood that broke with the authoritarian family and arranged marriages, and embraced free love and free choice marriage. In the late 1920s, projects of revolutionary emotional retooling reoriented passion, loyalty, and identity in the direction of the nation. But historians have relatively little source material that illuminates the linkage between changes in elite discourses and the everyday experiences of individual commoners, particularly for the study of emotional expression. The unusual survival of a set of petty-urbanite love letters permits the close textual mapping, in this essay, of the ways in which the broad public circulation in the Republican era of multiple and contradictory discourses of emotion entered into and affected particular commoner lives. © 2009 Koninklijke Brill NV.

Language: en

Keywords

Suicide; Chastity; History of emotion; Love letters; Petty-urbanites