Acknowledgements

This book comes from my dissertation work conducted at the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, with potions of it considerably revised.It would not have been possible without the loving support from Professor Ira Livingston(now at Pratt) and Professor Iona Man-Cheong.To me, they are exemplars of what it means to be an intellectual.They are truly the models for me to follow in my intellectual life, and to them, I owe my deepest gratitude.I have benefited enormously from conversations—back then and till now—with Ling Hon Lam(now at Berkeley), which taught me many things on emotion, theatricality and media.My heartfelt thanks also go to Milind Wakankar(now at the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi), who taught me to read Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer from standpoints other than the Western, and to Robert Harvey as well, whose meticulous concern and professional spirit are heartily remembered.

My gratitude extends to Clifford Siskin and Mary Poovey, with whom I took two seminars at the English Department of the New York University, and they were germinal for my intellectual thinking upon the British long eighteenth century.So were many things I learned from Kathleen Wilson in the Department of History.Without them, this project would have been much more historically insufficient.

Travels to the University of Glasgow and the Academia Sinica were great helps to my writing.I thank the organizers of the two occasions.(https://www.daowen.com)

I also thank Don Ihde, Linda Ihde and late Mark Ihde for the time spent in East Setauket.

This book is devoted to my family, now living in four places—Chengdu, Liupanshui, Hangzhou and Madison—of China and the United States.They are the veins of my life.In the last phase of this writing, Lu Liu came into my life, and she has been my sunshine ever since.In the mid-1980s, my uncle Wang Jianfeng—a peasant worker in Beijing and Chengdu for almost three decades now—bought me novels by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Standhal from one of the Xinhua Bookstores in Beijing.The literary literacy—one of the themes of this book—that his kindness helped to foster in me is recognized in various venues of my life, intellectual and otherwise.