Nan Z. Da: THE CHINESE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR

At the start of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ professions of love, but portions it out before hearing all of their answers. For Nan Da, this opening scene sparks a reckoning between The Tragedy of King Lear, one of the cruelest and most confounding stories in literature, and the tragedy of Maoist and post-Maoist China.

Join us on the Ivy patio to hear more from Dr. Da about her exciting new book, which blends literary analysis and personal history to investigate parallels for Shakespeare’s King Lear in twentieth-century Chinese history.

Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounters: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange.