Revolution of the Heart begins 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 feeling—especially romantic love—to the imagination of the nation, reform, and revolution in twentieth-century China. Lee's aim is to confront literary and social scientific approaches to the question of modernity with each other, and to demonstrate the fundamental interdependence of the “modern subject” and the “modern political community.” This interdependence is mediated by structures of feeling that manifest themselves through literary texts allegorizing the fate of the nation, challenges to received marriage practices, discussions of the most appropriate way to manage love, and even web-based advertisements for mourning services.
To this end, Lee joins close readings of canonical twentieth-century texts such as The Sea of Regret and The Biography of Ah Q with a thorough consideration of a wide variety...
