The Great Wall by Julia Lovell
Legendarily 2,200 years old and 4,300 miles long, the Great Wall of China seems to make an overwhelmingly confident physical statement about the country it spans: about China’s age-old sense of itself being an advanced civilization anxious to draw a clear line between itself and the barbarians” at its borders. But behind the wall’s intimidating exteriorand the myths that have built up around itis a complex history that has both defined and undermined China. Author Julia Lovell has written a new and important history of the Great Wall that guides the reader through the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire, from the second millennium BC to the present day. In recent years, the Wall has become an ever more potent symbol of Chinese nationalism, of a determination to resist foreign domination. But how successful was the Wall in reality, and what was its real purpose? Was it a precursor, albeit on a huge scale, of the Berlin Walla barrier designed to keep its population in as much as undesirables out? Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a three-thousand-year history far more fragmented and less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese state and the frontier policy that defined it, through the lives of the millions of individuals who supported, criticized, built, and attacked it.Julia Lovell is a writer, a translator, and a professor. She is the author of The Great Wall: China Versus the World 1000 BC-AD 2000, which has been translated into eighteen languages. She has translated numerous important Chinese works into English, including Eileen Chang's Lust, Caution, Lu Xun's Complete Fiction, and Yan Lianke's Serve the People. She is a lecturer at the University of London in modern Chinese history and literature, and she contributes to the Guardian, The Times, The Economist, and the Times Literary Supplement. She spends the most of the year with her family in China.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780802142979 |
| ISBN 10 | 0802142974 |
| Title | The Great Wall |
| Author | Julia Lovell |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press |
| Year published | 2007-04-05 |
| Number of pages | 432 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |