"This ambitious book is always engaging, often brilliant, and fantasically complex...[It] is essential reading for any scholar hoping to understand the discourse of aesthetics in modern China..."Thomas Moran, Middlebury College, MCLC Resource Center Publication (September 2011)"[...]a highly engaging study and a welcome addition to a number of important Western scholarly works on Chinese realism[...]not only makes for compelling reading, but it opens up the field of modern China studies to inquiries from other disciplines."Frederik Green, Macalester College, China Review International Vol. 16, No. 2, 2009