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Cultural production, including literary work, has been a key element in the Indigenous struggle for decolonization worldwide. In Taiwan, ethnographic novels written in Chinese, such as The Soul of Jade Mountain (Yushan hun) by Bunun writer Husluman Vava (1958 2007), have been an important tool in the process of bringing the circumstances of Indigenous people to the attention of mainstream audiences. Before his untimely death, Vava was one of the leaders of the Indigenous cultural revival movement in Taiwan. He was among the first Indigenous authors to make use of long fiction, and he did so quite prolifically. For Vava, as is the case for many Indigenous community leaders, the mission was twofold. He wanted to recover and preserve the rich traditions of his ancestors so that younger generations, in their search for their identity and roots in the modern world, could find quality sources created within their own community. Vava also wanted to make those in the mainstream aware of the true nature and depth of Bunun culture. His many short stories and novels fashion a vivid portrait of the Bunun people, their daily life, their values, and their aspirations. Vava created accessible characters in empathetic situations in order to demonstrate the deeply human qualities of traditional Bunun life and to suggest that those qualities maintain their validity in the modern world. Vava s novel The Soul of Jade Mountain won the 2007 Taiwan Literature Award for best novel. This is the first English translation of an ethnographic novel by a Taiwan Indigenous writer to be published by a North American publisher, marking an important step in bringing Indigenous Taiwan to international audiences.
This book is part of the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Professor Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania).For hundreds of years, into the twentieth century, the culture groups in the areas we now know as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam shared a great many political and social values, religious beliefs, and artistic and literary traditions. These common cultural features were recorded and transmitted in the same basic written language-classical or literary Chinese (known as guwen/wenyan in China, Kanbun in Japan, Hanmun in Korea, and Hánvan in Vietnam). The umbrella term for this shared language is "literary Sinitic"-a term designed to recognize the fact that although guwen/wenyan originally developed in China, it had a vibrant life of its own in other areas of East Asia (i.e., what this study terms the Sinosphere). This huge but understudied body of written documents offers extraordinarily rich resources for examining issues of cultural continuity and change in this important region of the world. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the political and social turmoil in East Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all four cultures abandoned their use of literary Sinitic. As a result, a great many documents written in this important script have been ignored, leaving a substantial gap in our understanding of the relationship between the histories and cultures of premodern East Asia. Like its companion volume, Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics and Identity Formation, this book seeks to fill this gap.One of the primary goals of this study is to break down the intellectual and cultural barriers that have made the Sinosphere difficult to see for itself. These barriers are of two sorts. One is the academic tendency toward intense specialization; most scholars of East Asia focus on a single country, a well-defined period, and an equally well-defined discipline (linguistics, philosophy, history, literature, art, etc.). Another is the tendency of scholars to privilege the country and period they study, and to adhere closely to their disciplinary training and outlook. To break down these barriers, a group of highly accomplished scholars committed to cross-cultural comparisons and interdisciplinary perspectives have been selected for this volume, and the result is a careful and critical examination of the complex cultural interactions that took place in premodern East Asia. Among the many contributions of this study are its examination of different literary genres (including "classics," poetic primers, works for and about women, detective stories, and folksongs), its broad chronological scope (from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries), its equally extensive spatial range (including China, the Xi Xia Kingdom, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea), and its attention to "minority" cultures. Another distinctive feature of this volume is its exploration of epistemological and culture change in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East Asia. Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in East Asia will appeal not only to academic specialists in the histories, philosophies, literary and artistic traditions of East Asia, but also to instructors of college-level courses in East Asian history and culture.
*This book is part of the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Professor Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania).For hundreds of years, into the twentieth century, the culture groups in the areas we now know as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam shared a great many political and social values, religious beliefs, and artistic and literary traditions. These common cultural features were recorded and transmitted in the same basic written language-classical or literary Chinese (known as guwen/wenyan in China, Kanbun in Japan, Hanmun in Korea, and Hánvan in Vietnam). The umbrella term for this shared language is "literary Sinitic"-a term designed to recognize the fact that although guwen/wenyan originally developed in China, it had a vibrant life of its own in other areas of East Asia (i.e., what this study terms the Sinosphere). This huge but understudied body of written documents offers extraordinarily rich resources for examining issues of cultural continuity and change in this important region of the world. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the political and social turmoil in East Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all four cultures abandoned their use of literary Sinitic. As a result, a great many documents written in this important script have been ignored, leaving a substantial gap in our understanding of the relationship between the histories and cultures of premodern East Asia. Like its companion volume, Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in East Asia, this book seeks to fill this gap.One of the primary goals of this study is to break down the intellectual and cultural barriers that have made the Sinosphere difficult to see for itself. These barriers are of two sorts. One is the academic tendency toward intense specialization; most scholars of East Asia focus on a single country, a well-defined period, and an equally well-defined discipline (linguistics, philosophy, history, literature, art, etc.). Another is the tendency of scholars to privilege the country and period they study, and to adhere closely to their disciplinary training and outlook. To break down these barriers, a group of highly accomplished scholars committed to cross-cultural comparisons and interdisciplinary perspectives have been selected for this volume, and the result is a careful and critical examination of the complex cultural interactions that took place in premodern East Asia. Among the many contributions of this study are its examination of different literary genres (including "classics," poetic primers, works for and about women, detective stories, and folksongs), its broad chronological scope (from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries), its equally extensive spatial range (including China, the Xi Xia Kingdom, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea), and its attention to "minority" cultures. Another distinctive feature of this volume is its exploration of epistemological and culture change in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East Asia. Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation will appeal not only to academic specialists in the histories, philosophies, literary and artistic traditions of East Asia, but also to instructors of college-level courses in East Asian history and culture.
The six stories in this collection are representative works from the mature period and the war period. Each story depicts different hardships and predicaments faced by Taiwan as a colony under Japanese rule, offering insight into how this part of Taiwan's history continues to impact contemporary Taiwanese society.
A History of Taiwan Literature, by Ye Shitao, an important public intellectual in Taiwan, is arguably one of the most important intellectual works of literary history. This translation is a most important resource for those interested in the intellectual history of East Asia, world literature, and Taiwan studies.
This ethnographic study develops the concept of cosmopolitan rurality as a social and geographical space that cannot be characterized as either urban or rural nor as specifically cosmopolitan or rustic. This study is an important book for Asian studies, rural studies, anthropology, and the study of entrepreneurialism.
It is now forty years after Mao Zedong s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, and more than fifty years since the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine. During this time, the collective memory of these events has been sanitized, reduced to a much-diluted version of what truly took place. Historical and sociological approaches cannot fully address the moral failure that allowed the atrocities of the Mao era to take place. Humanist approaches, such as literary criticism, have a central role to play in uncovering and making explicit the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators in memory writing in order to recover the truth of China s history. In this unprecedented study The Great Leap Backward, inspired by Holocaust studies, memory work such as fiction, memoirs, autobiographies, and documentary films that have surfaced since Mao's death are examined to uncover the many aspects of the forces underlying remembering and forgetting. These are significant for they also embody the politics of writing and publishing traumatic historical memories in contemporary China and beyond. Beginning with a scar literature classic and ending with popular Cultural Revolution memoirs that appeared early in the twenty-first century, this study provides us with another important way through which memory studies can help us grapple with traumatic histories.
A journal of the Business Research Consortium.
Algeria is, without a doubt, one of the most complex societies of the modern world. This country is known for its ancient history, its multilingualism, its multiethnic social fabric, its glorious War of Independence, its leadership for Third World movements in the 1960s, and its tragic Dark Decade of the 1990s. To date, no filmmaker has depicted this Algerian complexity better than Merzak Allouache. He has devoted his entire filmmaking career, spanning over forty years, to a lucid portrayal of this complex and yet fascinating nation. This study explains how Allouache broke away from state-run cinema to create an original style that makes him both unique and extremely interesting. Through an in-depth analysis of his films and documentaries, this book offers both contextual background and insightful perspectives to help the readers better understand this complexity which characterizes Algeria. This is the first study in any language that examines Merzak Allouache s entire filmography and it sheds light on most, if not all, the intriguing cultural, political and social changes that the Algerian people have been facing since independence in 1962. By making Algerian society the focal point in most of his films, Allouache provides a provocative commentary on social, historical, political, economic, linguistic, religious, and gender issues. Algeria on Screen: Society, Politics, and Culture in the Films of Merzak Allouache is an important book for North African studies, French studies and Cinema studies.
Japan emerged from the Edo Period (1600-1868) with a legal system which, in many ways, tended to privilege situational judgment over strict adherence to universally-applicable legal codes. Under pressure from without and within to modernize, Japan adopted many Western laws and jurisprudential practices which were largely alien to Japanese society. At the same time, Japan took on Western modes of political participation which tended to exacerbate more than solve the social ills attendant on industrialization and modernity. Suehiro Izutar?, a legal scholar at the University of Tokyo, and a group of likeminded professors and activists attempted to ameliorate Japanese social problems through a case law method, making the courts more responsive to the poor through the application of a native form of Japanese equity from the Edo Period. However, as Japan s regional reach expanded and the world situation darkened, the prerogatives of empire cut short Suehiro s social experiments and eventually co-opted even Suehiro himself in imperial logic. Japanese law is often approach comparatively, but in this study the inner workings of law in Japan jurisprudentially as well as philosophically and politically are given priority. By foregrounding case studies and other primary sources in Japanese, Equity under Empire shows how Japan, and the Japanese legal-political system, changed from the inside. Following the career of one of the twentieth century s most prominent legal minds, Equity under Empire maps the intellectual and historical twists and turns that set Japan on a course far removed from Edo equity, grappling with the internal contradictions of imperialism as she moved beyond the archipelago in a struggle with Anglo-European powers in Asia and the Pacific. This is a from-the-inside look at the life of the law in Japan from the closing years of Edo through the first half of the twentieth century. Equity under Empire is an important book for collections on East Asian history and law, and on law and legal philosophy in general.
When we maintain the modern separation of the philosophical from the spiritual and neglect the spiritual currents, our comprehension of Plato's intentions as manifested in his philosophical discourse remains greatly obscured. This study aims at achieving a balance.
This book traces the roots of the current turmoil and sheds light on overlooked factors impacting nation building in post-colonial Cameroon. Drawing from political science, literature, and history, it is a timely interdisciplinary study that is applicable to other postcolonial contexts, in Africa and elsewhere.
Ecuadorian and other Latin American activists and academics involved in decolonial political projects. Emanating from social sectors marginalized by the processes of modernity, interculturality provides a grounded critique of the ethnic, class, gender and epistemic exclusions of modern liberal hegemony. Assuming a decolonial standpoint, intercultural theorists argue that a just and sustainable society can only be built by working to rid social institutions of structural inequalities and exclusionary practices. They reject the notion that any one tradition has all of the answers to social problems, instead insisting that solutions are created in the spaces between cultures. So long as inequality and exclusion exist, however, knowledge, practice and cooperation can never be truly shared. This book examines cultural and political changes in Ecuador, and particularly in the Otavalo Valley of the Northern Sierra, in the wake of the country s Indigenous movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The primary focus is on the decade between 2006 and 2016. This period represents an important juncture, as people in Indigenous communities began constructing the new normal after a time of profound political, cultural and social change, brought about by the concerted effort of their organizations. The election of Rafael Correa on a very progressive platform also represented, ironically, the decline of the national Indigenous organizations as institutional political actors. That is not to say their disappearance, but rather their transformation into something else. The new normal also does not imply a complete break with the past and the forging together of something completely different. Rather, it was the weaving together of different strands of the cultural tapestry of collective life. Many Kichwa people in this period continued to live and rework their traditional practices and belief in a context of greater exposure to and contact with other cultural groups. Although these communities were never isolated from others their relationship changed as a result of the mobilizations from 1990s onward. Those mobilizations themselves, of course, were part of a much longer historic trajectory of resistance, autonomous development, and internal and external negotiations. The construction of this new normal, finally, did not happen simply as the manifestation of some collective will. Rather it was the result of multiple and constant negotiations as individuals and groups asserted new or transformed identities and practices while they navigated drastically changed landscapes, some of their own doing and some well beyond their control. The movement s fight for the rights of Indigenous peoples, while focused on issues of land rights, political participation, autonomy and cultural difference, never called for separation from its majority Mestizo population. Instead, the movement articulated its demands around a call for interculturality, that is, a process through which the country s different cultural groups ought to seek out new relationships built on equality, respect, coexistence and mutual learning to create the conditions for a more just and sustainable country. While on the surface such a proposal might seem little different than multiculturalism, it staked out a decolonial position by recognizing that not only were cultural groups different, but that their relationships were built on historic and continuing inequality. They demanded, therefore, a profound transformation of cultural, political and epistemological structures. Intercultural Interventions: Politics, Community, and Environment in the Otavalo Valley documents and analyzes how the concept of interculturality intervened in theoretical discussions of social change, the disruption of colonial-era political institutions in Otavalo and Cotacachi, the re-constitution of the idea of Kichwa community, and how intercultural strategies were used to define and implement solutions to environmental problems. By paying attention to the often uneven and ambiguous ways in which interculturality intervened in people s public lives as a result of the success of the Indigenous movement, this book contributes to decolonial theory by connecting that critique to the complex changes that took place in Andean Kichwa Ecuador of the first part of the twenty-first century.
Wet nursing in Brazil dates to approximately the late eighteenth century when upper-class families used black women slaves to breastfeed their white infants. Soon use of a black wet nurse became the norm among elite families in various parts of the country. Wet nursing developed into a business based on the need for breast milk, and the purchase, sale, and renting of slaves to meet the demand. In the late nineteenth century, a growing number of medical experts and abolitionists lobbied against wet nursing. Their efforts, combined with the abolition of slavery and the switch to a Republican government, triggered a decline in the practice. Nevertheless, this custom had become so deep-rooted and widespread that it only became fully obsolete in the 1920s. Brazil s history of wet nursing was recorded in artistic renderings. Europeans were the first to depict these black women slaves in their paintings and prints in the first half of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, international and national photographers created studio portraits of wet nurses with their white charges. Only in the twentieth century, when the nation was struggling with race relations post-abolition, did white artists acknowledge that the black women wet nurses were biological mothers, themselves, in their paintings. Since then, a small number of sculptors have used the black wet nurse as an artistic subject. While scholars have identified samba, Carnaval, and Candombl as forms of expression through which to explore the topic of race in Brazil, more studies of how art has functioned as a reflection of race relations are needed. One might expect the anonymous black wet nurse to have faded into obscurity well before the start of the twenty-first century; yet, this female figure remains a durable subject of artistic renderings and discourse on racial politics. This study uses renderings of the black wet nurse as a lens through which to explore broader social developments in Brazilian history and to analyze how artistic representations of this body of women have both followed and challenged dominant attitudes toward race and the memory of slavery. Of the enslaved blacks who were used for a variety of types of labor in the urban and rural settings, and who also feature in artistic renderings, this black wet nurse is the only one who continues to be referenced in contemporary visual culture and discussions of race relations in Brazil. This is the first study to bring together a number of prints, photographs, paintings, and sculptures of this female figure from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and S o Paulo, and to not only consider the works in their individual artistic and historical contexts, but also in relation to each other. The range of different types of artworks underscores the fact that the black wet nurses were not simply marginalized types, relegated to the memory of the era of slavery, but a complex group of women who, in fact, nourished a nation. Black Women Slaves Who Nourished A Nation: Artistic Renderings of Wet Nurses in Brazil is an important book for art history, Latin American, and African diaspora collections.
This study examines the small figures, mostly Buddhas, depicted in the aureole of Buddha images. This motif has appeared in various places in Central Asia and East Asia throughout the centuries. By contextualizing these images in local history and local Buddhism, this book sheds light on issues in Buddhist history and cultural transmission.
One of the largest casino-entertainment venues in Macao is called City of Dreams. True to its name, it is a city unto itself, devoted entirely to pleasure, consumption and luxury living. The massive campus includes luxury residences and high-end retail stores, restaurants, spas, extravagant performance venues and, of course, gaming facilities. The City of Dreams is an enclosed city with its own interior boulevards and its own theater district, called Soho. It even has its own blue-chip architecture, the Morpheus, a luxury hotel designed by the late Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE, using the world s most advanced and innovative building technology. This is a study of the nature of casino cities through Macao s stories. The author examines how the development of the city into a world gambling and entertainment capital affects the daily lives of the city s residents. The literary or filmic narratives of Macao capture how it feels to be citizens of these cities, the emotional responses, and thoughts of those who living within the conditions of these dreamworlds. But importantly, they also reveal the kinds of imagination and creativity of those living there and their strategies of taking hold of the narrative of the city for themselves, against the dominant state discourse. The writings discussed in this volume are all published after the liberalization of the gambling industry in Macao in 2002, when the city embarked on an accelerated and dramatic transformation. The contemporary literary scene in Macao is lively and diverse, impressive given how small the population the population is (a little over 600,000) vis- -vis an all-encompassing casino industry and the tens of millions of tourists it brings to the city every year. The author discusses works from fiction writers who live and work primarily in Macao, as well as refer to the works of essayists and social commentators who regularly publish in the local print media. Also included are writers who might not have a resident card but have strong personal or historic ties to the city, either through a career opportunity that brought them there, family history, or having grown up there. The author uses their works to study the effect of contemporary Macao on the global imagination, especially under the current regime of global circulation of capital and people. Through these works, the author presents another way of understanding Macao, beyond the official measures of GDPs and economics. The author captures the often-inarticulate sentiments and aspirations of the common people, in order to challenge and change the direction, discursive as well as political, of the society. In so doing, the author overlays the official ideology of this kind of casino city that Macao represents with a complex network of the experiences and stories of those who live in it, under its specific economic and social compulsions. In each chapter of this volume, the author examines particular works that illustrate a different experiential and emotional phenomenon of life in this city.
This is the first comprehensive study and translation into English of Chinese literary works dealing with insects.
In the span of little more than a decade, Paul Auster and Philip Roth two writers radically dissimilar in style and vision each produced a series of texts that bore the imprint of the author s father s death. This study examines these two series: Auster s The Invention of Solitude (1982) and The New York Trilogy (1987), and Roth s The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), and Operation Shylock (1993). Within these two transgeneric series, Auster and Roth juxtaposed the textual incorporation of their given names with the thanatographic acts they dedicated to their fathers, Sam Auster and Herman Roth. This juxtaposition prompts us to reflect upon the status of the author s given name as a textual inheritance and vehicle of communal memory. Auster s and Roth s assertions of artistic autonomy from familial and ethnoreligious obligations have been career-defining. However (and perhaps unsurprisingly), the writing prompted by the deaths of their fathers retraces their respective itineraries as Jewish sons and as American writers. As these itineraries unfold, aesthetic differences between the two authors cannot obscure the historical commonalities shared by two men born fourteen years apart in Newark, New Jersey, as grandsons to the Galician Jewish immigrants who bore the names Auster and Roth across the Atlantic and into American life. By examining the composition histories of and the intertextual indebtedness within each of these series, this study offers a reading of Auster s and Roth s works as forms of kaddish. While readers may be justifiably skeptical at the thought of placing liturgical language in the mouths of avowedly secular writers, this study argues that Auster s and Roth s works engage, tendentiously, in a discourse that reconciles the bereaved child to the limitations, merits, and the loss of the deceased parent. In doing so, these writers are drawn into a broader discourse of Jewish filiation in the United States under conditions that oblige them to subordinate their originality as literary authors to their derivativeness as historical and genealogical subjects. To read these texts as kaddishim is to recognize Auster and Roth as being engaged in active projects of inheriting the names, myths, and historical predicaments entailed by being their fathers sons.
New and noteworthy titles in Asian studies that will be useful for university and college libraries, as well as for professors, researchers, and students.
By charting a history in which sensualist poetry reached unprecedented and unsurpassed heights through late Ming poets, experienced a period of hibernation during most of the Qing, and then reemerged to awaken the senses of late Qing and early Republican readers, The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China brings to light an important Chinese literary tradition and underscores intellectual trends that have been neglected, marginalized, misunderstood, and even condemned. Uncovering an important but neglected part of history during which the freelance intelligentsia, who emerged in late imperial and early Republican China, countered the political mainstream by drawing on a long yet marginalized tradition of sensual lyricism, this book offers the first history of how fragrant and bedazzling (xiangyan) became a guiding aesthetic of countercultural movements from the late Ming to the early Republican era roughly, from the late sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. Sensualist poets and other writers of these eras extolled amorous desire and romantic love. Through erotic poetry, they rebelled against not only orthodox Neo-Confucianism but also the radical cultural reform agenda of the late Qing and the New Culture Movement of the Republic. In eras that emphasized sociopolitical functions of literature, they promoted classical lyricism and the satisfaction of individual expressive needs. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book argues that sensual lyricism is more political than its sensuous surfaces and that China s lyrical tradition is sexier and more modern than existing histories have led us to believe. This study demonstrates that dominant political ideologies and cultural practices of early modern China always faced counteractions in the form of a discourse of sensuality, femininity, and romance. The book examines myriad primary sources, such as the monumental anthologies of sensual poetry compiled in both the late Ming and the late Qing periods, which are brought to critical attention for the first time. Bridging literary and intellectual history, the study surveys three hundred years of poetry and essays, from individual collections to voluminous anthologies, and from traditional books to modern magazines. The first half of the book focuses on materials produced during the Ming, and the second half examines publications of the turn of the twentieth century. In her examination of these sources, Xiaorong Li shows that the poetics of sensuality was political on personal and historical levels during and beyond the late imperial period. Sensuality and decadence, Li argues, were forces of literary modernization, as well as an important continuity between the eras often referred to as premodern and modern. Li also relates Chinese sensual literature to decadent movements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. In both contexts, while perceived as a reflection of moral decay, decadent literature posed challenges to social and cultural norms by representing the repressed individual body and its cultural expressions. This comparative perspective brings us toward a better understanding of sensualism as a part of modernity.
In the early twentieth century, new technologies of media, communication, and transportation opened up a world of possibilities and led to transformations of the public sphere. Amongst the hundreds of new periodicals flooding the Australian marketplace, quality culture and leisure magazines beckoned to readers with the glamour of modernity and exotic images of pre-modern paradise. Through instructive and entertaining content, these glossy modern magazines widened the horizons of non-metropolitan audiences and connected readers in rapidly urbanising cities such as Sydney and Melbourne with the latest fashions, current affairs, and cultural offerings of London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. Designed by fashionable commercial artists, travel advertisements for shipping companies such as Burns Philp, Cunard, Matson, and P&O lined their pages. The golden age of the culture and leisure magazine coincided with the golden age of sea travel, middlebrow aspiration, and modernity. Focusing on the Australian interwar periodicals The Home, The BP Magazine, and MAN, this book explores the contraction of vast geographical spaces and the construction of cultural hierarchies alongside the advent of new media. This book investigates the role tastemaking culture and leisure magazines played in transporting the public imagination outward beyond the shores of Australia and upward or downward on the rapidly changing scales of cultural value. By delivering a potent mix of informative instruction, entertainment, worldliness, and escape, these magazines constructed distinct geographical imaginaries connected to notions of glamour, sophistication, and aspiration. They guided their readers through the currents of international modernity and helped them find their place in the modern world. This book is based on thorough research into an archive of important yet under-examined modern Australian periodicals, and makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on magazines and middlebrow culture in the interwar period. It offers new insights into the formation of the tastes of a rapidly modernising and differentiating reading public, as well as new understandings of the cultures of vernacular modernity and colonialism. This book also offers alternative perspectives, and positions Australia s cultural and literary history within transnational cultural flows across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its analysis of Australian colonial modernity thus provides a model for examining collisions of modernity and colonialism, and for investigating connections between geographical imaginaries and social mobility, in other international contexts. The Transported Imagination will appeal to a wide range of scholars. Primary audiences are scholars of Australian cultural and literary history; and scholars of print culture, reading history, the middlebrow, mobility studies, media history, and colonial modernity in other national or local milieus. Written in a fluid, reader-friendly style, this book will also appeal to the general reader, and is of special relevance to a range of university courses and students whose research focuses on print culture, periodical studies, or travel in the context of modernism and modernity.
This book explores a new and innovative topic the relationship between geographical advancements in the Mid-Tang period (790s to 820s) and spatial imaginaries in contemporaneous literature. Historically and politically, the Mid-Tang period is generally considered to be a period of imperial reconstruction following the chaos of the An Lushan Rebellion (755 763), a rebellion that had a profound impact not only on the Tang empire but also on all of Chinese history. On the one hand, this era witnessed a heightened geographical awareness and a rapid development and accumulation of geographical knowledge, as was manifested in the governmental production of local map-guides and the invention of some monumental world maps. On the other hand, Mid-Tang literature represents one of the peaks of traditional Chinese literature and is known for its diversity of genres and innovative and imaginative engagement with space. For the first time in Tang scholarship, this study identifies the epistemological and aesthetic interplay between geography and literature in medieval China and investigates how this thus-far neglected interplay shaped the Mid-Tang literary imagination. This interdisciplinary investigation uncovers a rich cultural history of human exploration of the world on both fronts and provides a fresh reading of some of the most famous works of Tang literature, for example Li He s poetry and Liu Zongyuan s landscape essays. This study reveals some unique phenomena in genre development and individual creation in Mid-Tang literature and deepens our understanding of the inner workings and internal drive of traditional Chinese literature in general. This book expands and deepens the exploration of the interactions between literature and geography. Literary geography has been an active interdisciplinary field ever since the 1970s. In the early years as the field was taking shape, it was widely criticized for its instrumentalization of literary texts as unproblematic sources for empirical geographical study. In recent years, however, literary scholars have become increasingly interested in treating literary texts as another form of geography, or spatial organization, as many key literary elements, such as setting and milieu in fiction and imagery arrangement in poetry, involve spatial understanding on a fundamental level. This study takes two important approaches regarding the ongoing debates in the field of literary geography. Inasmuch as traditional Chinese intellectual culture prioritized broad learning over specialization, disciplinary boundaries were unclear and literati were often multitalented. Accordingly, in the cases examined in this book, these literary masters were also cartographers, geographical writers, or at least experienced readers of geographical works. Therefore, the study s approach does not treat either literature or geography as instrumental to the other, but rather examines how these two interrelated fields formed a shared intellectual horizon among the literati and found entrance to each other to create new knowledge, perspectives, and metaphors. This study also does not regard literature as a metaphorical geography in a generalized sense, but is specifically focused on how the geographic proficiency of literary authors informed their literature. Together, these two approaches suggest new possibilities of interdisciplinary exchange and offer a new perspective on the results of such exchanges as embodied in literary creation. This book will be a welcome resource for scholars and students in Chinese literature, historical geography, cultural history, and art history.
This is a pioneering examination of the burgeoning US-China defense technological competition and provides perspectives not only from US analysts but also from China and Russia.
This is a pioneering examination of the burgeoning US-China defense technological competition and provides perspectives not only from US analysts but also from China and Russia.
The Australian writer Roger McDonald is the author of ten novels, two novelisations from and for film scripts, two television scripts, one semi-fictionalised memoir, a collection of essays, and two volumes of poetry. His publication record spans half a century from the late 1960s up until the late teens with his tenth novel, A Sea Chase, published in 2017. His books have achieved a significant record in the Australian list of literary awards and he has gone close to breaking into the major international prizes that distinguish the transnational careers of other contemporary Australian writers such as Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey, David Malouf, and, more recently, Kate Grenville. McDonald s work has been published in London and New York as well as in the key metropolitan markets of his native Australia, and it has been translated into Spanish, German, and Swedish. 1915, his first novel, was adapted into an Australian Broadcasting Commission television series, which was shown on Australian screens in the early 1980s and distributed internationally. McDonald writes about ordinary characters whose lives have often been overtaken by historical forces they do not understand and cannot control. These men and women are commonly defined by whom they know and what they do rather than through the display of extraordinary qualities of mind, sensibility, or virtue. McDonald often situates his characters within foundational Australian historical periods such as the convict period, frontier settlement, the development of the pastoral industry, the Great War, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Second World War and its aftermath. This later post-war period saw the transformation of Anglo-Celtic Australia by waves of initially southern and eastern European migration, followed by Asian and indeed wider international migration. The emerging multicultural character of the country coincided with the decline of rural Australia and the pastoral industry as the preferred locations for representative Australian types and values. These events or periods are well entrenched within the public memory of a White Australia and that enables McDonald to explore his characters search for purpose and fulfillment within the mythological registers of his nation s postcolonial history. This study focuses on the books (five novels and the fictionalised memoir) in which McDonald has decided to situate his characters search for purpose and well-being within the mythological registers of colonial history. It explores McDonald s investments in story and his developments in idiom and literary form, as endeavors to engage a wider public in the problem of postcolonial settlement. The common narrative problem is the elusiveness of a condition of Being that is well settled in the web of social, cultural, and environmental connections that are necessary for dwelling. McDonald pursues the possibilities for a wider more satisfying sense of human connection but his representations of the common man under the conditions of postcolonial modernity never allow that to come easily.
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