New Books in Literary Studies Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)
Aug 21, 2025
Nan Z. Da, an associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, discusses her book, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear. She draws compelling parallels between Shakespeare's play and Chinese history, focusing on themes like familial strife and authoritarianism. Da highlights how King Lear's dynamics reflect the complexities of heritage within the Chinese diaspora. The conversation also explores the adaptability of tragedy across cultures, along with Da's insights into her future literary projects and the evolving critique of classic works.
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Play's Formal Trickiness Mirrors History
- Nan Z. Da connects Lear's formal trickiness to the complexity of Chinese history and its sequences.
- She finds affinity because both present layered, hard-to-pin-down relations to historical causality.
Lear As A Dynastic Crisis Play
- Nan situates Lear among Shakespeare's late tragedies produced around James I's accession and dynastic anxieties.
- She argues Lear engages unusually tricky relations to history and catastrophic regime change.
Unanalogizable Yet Historian's Tool
- Nan argues Lear is 'unanalogizable' yet instructive about making judgement calls in history and family.
- The play models how misreading and timing distort what later becomes historical record.
