Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China

This book opens up three new topics in modern Chinese literary history: the intimate lives of modern China's most famous literary couple, Lu Xun and Xu Guangping; real and imagined love-letters in modern Chinese literature; and concepts of privacy in China as shown by a comparison between the edited and unedited versions of their letters. Although it has sometimes been claimed that Chinese culture lacks a sense of privacy, this study reveals the contents, functions, and values of privacy in the early twentieth century.