Lam Ling Hon's 林凌瀚 exploration of Chinese discourses on emotion (qing) in the context of the historical development of the theater is pathbreaking. The work of more than a decade, it combines wide-ranging readings of vernacular plays and novels, canonical texts and their commentaries, classical tales, letters, notebook jottings, poetry, and classical prose with explorations of theoretical and philosophical works in several languages. Each of its main chapters draws on several disciplines to explore “genealogies” of emotion-realms, morals, playgrounds, knowledge, and time-space, respectively. Chapters 1–3 are largely concerned with historical developments within China, especially but not exclusively from the medieval (Song–Yuan) to early modern periods (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries); the last two chapters also take up developments outside of China, especially in Europe. Lam's project is to reconceive the historical ontology of emotion-realms (qingjing) in Chinese culture, “explicitly and primarily as the genealogy of the spatiality...
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