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Facing the Monarch examines the role of rhetoric in shaping the dynamic between Chinese ministers and monarchs in the era between the Spring and Autumn period and the later Han dynasty. Essays analyze classical Chinese works to provide fresh perspectives on the impact of political circumstances on modes of expression.

A Sense of Place examines the vast Kanto region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Japan. Using memoirs, letters, travelogues, land registers, and other documents, David Spafford analyzes the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited.

This study offers a new view of South Korea's transformation since 1960.Focusing on three turning points--the creation of the development state in the 1960s, democratization in 1987, and the 1997 economic crisis--Jongryn Mo and Barry R. Weingast show how Korea sustained growth by resolving crises in favor of greater political and economic openness.

The first full-length biography of a premodern Japanese nun, The Princess Nun is the story of Bunchi (1619-1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshoji. The study incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi's ascetic practice to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion.

Trent E. Maxey documents how religion came to be seen as the "greatest problem" by the architects of the modern Japanese state. Maxey shows that in Meiji Japan, religion designated a cognitive and social pluralism that resisted direct state control. It also provided the state with a means to contain, regulate, and neutralize that plurality.

Melek Ortabasi reassesses the influence of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, in shaping modern Japan's cultural identity. Only the second book-length English-language study of Yanagita, this book moves beyond his pioneering work in folk studies to reveal the full range of his contributions as a public intellectual.

Hiraku Shimoda places the origin of modern Japanese regionalism in the tense relationship between region and nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study shows that "region," often seen as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities.

Natasha Heller offers a cultural history of Buddhism through a case study of the Chan master Zhongfeng Mingben. Monks of his stature developed a broad set of cultural competencies for navigating social and intellectual relationships. Heller shows the importance of situating monks as actors within wider sociocultural fields of practice and exchange.

Chinese martial arts novels from the late nineteenth century are full of suggestive sounds. Characters curse in colorful dialect accents, and action scenes come to life with the loud clash of swords. Paize Keulemans examines the relationship between these novels and earlier storyteller manuscripts to explain the purpose and history of these sounds.

Investing Japan demonstrates that foreign investment is a vital and misunderstood aspect of Japan's modern economic development. This study investigates the role played by foreign companies in the Japanese experience of modernization, highlighting their identity as key agents in the processes of industrialization and technology transfer.

Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. Challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the powers of the state and of local elites, Lee shows that state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing.

Ink landscape painting is a distinctive feature of the Northern Song, and Song painters created some of the most celebrated artworks in Chinese history. Foong Ping shows how landmark works of this era came to be identified first as potent symbols of imperial authority and later as objects by which exiled scholars expressed disaffection and dissent.

Catherine L. Phipps examines a largely unacknowledged system of "special trading ports" that operated under full Japanese jurisdiction in the shadow of the better-known treaty ports. Phipps demonstrates why the special trading ports were key to Japan's achieving autonomy and regional power during the pivotal second half of the nineteenth century.

From the 1910s to the 1940s, a wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the Korean cultural scene with differing agendas but shared demands for equality and social justice. Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture, focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression.

The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Chapters analyze the Korean experience from a wide range of economic and social perspectives, as well as describing the country's economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met.

Focusing on Japan's Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China's northeastern provinces, Emer O'Dwyer traces the history of Japan's prewar Manchurian empire over four decades to show how South Manchuria was naturalized as a Japanese space and how this process contributed to the success of the Japanese army's early 1930s takeover of Manchuria.

Stigmatized throughout Japanese history as outcastes, the burakumin are contemporary Japan's largest minority. In this study of youths from two different communities, Christopher Bondy explores how individuals navigate their social world, demonstrating the ways in which people make conscious decisions about disclosing a stigmatized identity.

By the late eleventh century the Song court no longer dominated production of information about itself. Hilde De Weert demonstrates how the growing involvement of the literati in publishing such information altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the Chinese imperial period.

Zhao Ma explores lower-class women's struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife in Beijing from 1937 to 1949. He shows how the everyday survival tactics they devised allowed them to subtly deflect, subvert, and "escape without leaving" powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics.

Since the last years of the Qing dynasty, youth has been made a new agent of history in Chinese intellectuals' visions of national rejuvenation. Mingwei Song combines historical investigations of the origin and development of the modern Chinese youth discourse with close analyses of the novelistic construction of the Chinese Bildungsroman.

Elizabeth Kindall's definitive study elucidates the context for the paintings of Huang Xiangjian (1609-1673) and identifies geo-narrative as a distinct landscape-painting tradition lauded for its naturalistic immediacy, experiential topography, and dramatic narratives of moral persuasion, class identification, and biographical commemoration.

Timothy J. Van Compernolle reconsiders the rise of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility, arguing that social mobility is the privileged lens through which Meiji novelists explored abstract concepts of national belonging, social hierarchy, and the new space of an industrializing nation.

Beheaded for plotting against the Qing empire, poet Qiu Jin would later be celebrated as a Republican martyr and China's first feminist. Hu Ying studies Qiu's enduring bond with Wu Zhiying and Xu Zihua, who braved political persecution to keep her legacy alive. In doing so, their friendship fulfilled its ultimate socially transformative potential.

Heekyoung Cho investigates the meanings and functions that translation generated for modern national literatures during their formative period and reconsiders literature as part of a dynamic translational process of negotiating foreign values. Cho's study focuses on literary and cultural relations among Russia, Japan, and colonial Korea.

Mark E. Byington explores the formation, history, and legacy of ancient Puyo, the earliest archaeologically attested state to arise in northeastern Asia. He discusses how the legacy of Puyo contributed to modes of statecraft of later northeast Asian states and provided a basis for a developing historiographical tradition on the Korean peninsula.

Matthew Fraleigh examines the life and works of Narushima Ryuhoku (1837-1884): Confucian scholar, world traveler, pioneering journalist, and irrepressible satirist. This is the first book-length study of Ryuhoku in a Western language and one of the first Western-language monographs to examine Sinitic poetry and prose composition in modern Japan.

Movements of people-through migration, exile, and diaspora-are central to understanding power relationships in Japan 900-1400. But what of more literary moves: texts with abrupt genre leaps or poetic figures that flatten distances? Terry Kawashima examines what happens when both types of tropes-literal travels and literary shifts-coexist.

Chien-hsin Tsai examines the reinvention of loyalism in colonial Taiwan through the lens of literature. He analyzes the ways in which writers from colonial Taiwan-including Qiu Fengjia, Lian Heng, and Wu Zhuoliu-creatively and selectively employed loyalist ideals to cope with Japanese colonialism and its many institutional changes.

W. Puck Brecher overturns standard narratives of wartime Japan's racial attitudes, focusing on the experiences of Western civilians rather than enemy POWs in Japan. His bold thesis is borne out by a broad mosaic of stories of police harassment, suspicion, relocation, starvation, internment, and torture, as well as extraordinary acts of charity.

Brian Steininger revisits Japan's mid-Heian court of the Tale of Genji and the Pillow Book, where literary Chinese was not only the basis of official administration, but also a medium for political protest, sermons of mourning, and poems of celebration.