The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (Allen Lane History S.) - Hardcover

Jonathan Spence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713993138 ISBN 13: 9780713993134

Publisher: Allen Lane. Book Condition: Us, 1998

Synopsis

History

About this title

Review:

Distinguished Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence examines the influence that China has long exercised on the Western imagination. Drawing on literary, historical, and travel writing from the 14th century to the present, he shows how the fabulations of medieval writers such as Marco Polo gave way to more factually minded reports from business travelers and diplomats. This then turned again to the exoticism of poets such as Ezra Pound and Charles Baudelaire, and in our time, returned to the realism of writers such as Pearl S. Buck and Edgar Snow. Spence's tour of these various ways of perceiving China yields a vigorous and interesting book that is of a piece with his many other studies of Chinese history. --Gregory MacNamee

About the Author:

Jonathan D. Spence is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he has taught for thirty years. He has been awarded MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Search for Modern China won the Lionel Gelber Award and the Kiriyama Book Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane. Book Condition: Us
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0713993138
• ISBN 13: 9780713993134
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288