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In this paper, the author analyses the apocryphal text Shouluo biqiu jing, centred around the saviour bodhisattva Yueguang Tongzi (Candraprabhākumāra in Sanskrit). It is possible that this text was written in Silla, with some connection with its royalty and the hwarang group. This paper confronts this hypothesis with other ones that connect it to some Sui-Tang millenarian movements. Chosen methodology is the historical and philological analysis. The conclusion is that the text was likely written in China, bu it possibly circulated in Korean Peninsula. The text is probably the result of composition and manipulation.

Enchi Fumiko’s literature has frequently faced the topic of ageing, especially focused on the bodily decay from the point of view of disease or loss of beauty and femininity and often in reference to the double standard adopted for female and male bodies. In this paper, focusing mainly on the novel Komachi hensō (1965) and the short story “Futaomote” (1959), I analyse how in Enchi’s works the figure of the actress and the one of the onnagata actor perceive the process of ageing vis-à-vis their gender and sexuality. The onnagata and the actress experience a real loss of identity when facing age, since the success they have lived has almost been based on the charm of their figure on the stage. In this paper I analyse how the protagonists cope with the reality of ageing, comparing their reaction with regard to their gender and sexuality. By looking from a peculiar perspective the idea of the ‘female’ decaying body, I aim at giving a further contribution to the already rich scholarship on the vision of ageing in Enchi’s literature. Moreover, I aim to demonstrate that the foundational elements of Enchi’s series of works, known as rōjomono or ‘works on old women’, typically believed to have originated in the 1970s, were in fact established as early as the late 1950s.

The paper aims to explore the practical aspects of the Safavid envoys’ travels to Venice in the sixteenth and the first part of the seventeenth centuries. In particular, it will reconstruct the itineraries of the journeys of the Safavid delegates to Venice, analyse the challenges and difficulties of long-distance travel experienced by them and the impact of the Ottoman factor on both the Safavid and Venetian envoys’ travel planning and trajectories. The paper reveals that the first Safavid trade mission to Venice was sent in 1597 and not in 1600, as previously known in the historiography. We will shed light on the social status of the Safavid envoys and clarify the role and duties of the garak-yaraqs (purveyors) of the Safavid Royal Household among them. We will examine the impact of the overall character of the Safavid-Ottoman relations both on the size of the missions and the intensity of the diplomatic and trade contacts between the Republic of Venice and the Safavid Empire.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on locally constructed sculptural representations of donors and devotees from Butkara I in Swat valley – one of the earliest Buddhist sites in the Greater Gandhara region. The discovery of several sculptures and architectural elements depicting elaborately adorned male and female figures with distinctly individualizing facial features, and bearing varied Buddhist offerings, not only throws into relief the artistic phenomenon of portraiture in early Gandharan Buddhist art but also exemplifies the visual and material enactment of donative ritual and practice. The appropriation of a transcultural and widely legible visual vocabulary for constructing these essentially Buddhist figures underscores the complex cross-cultural interactions and encounters underpinning Gandharan art and Buddhist practice in the early centuries of the Common Era. The paper argues that, in addition to relic establishment and donative inscriptions, the ruling aristocrats used donor portraits for the material and metaphorical embodiment of their presence and piety within the Buddhist monastic space. Moreover, these images likely served as public performances for effectively navigating the broader political and socio-cultural currents. Speaking to diverse communities in the multicultural matrix of Gandhara, these donor portraits highlight the participation of visual imagery in constructing new forms of ritual and practice predicated upon the intertwined notions of power, patronage, and religiosity.

This paper aims to examine the life, experiences, and limitation of Ch’oe Yŏngsuk, a notable New Woman figure subjected to colonial restrictions in Korea during the early 20th century, with empirical resources, including newly discovered archives from the Swedish National Archive and the Sigtunastiftelsen archive. While Korean women were able to receive a modern education from the late 19th century, Ch’oe studied in Shanghai and then went to Sweden in 1926 to study sociology, becoming the first Korean woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in Economics. After her studies, she traveled extensively and met influential people. Despite her notable achievements, Ch’oe could not find a proper job and died in poverty a few months after her return. This paper seeks to shed light on her life during her stay in Sweden and her activities in the independence and feminist movements there. The relationship between her ‘failure’ after returning home and the constraints of the time, given spatially/periodically and gender-wise, will also be examined. It is also worth noting that her case is a symbolic example of the social constraints that elite women had to face at the time. Her contrasting activities and evaluations in Sweden and Korea show how constrained and suppressed a woman’s life is by the time and space in which it positions.

The aim of this paper is to analyse morphosyntactic structures in the language of kyōgen – a traditional form of Japanese comic theatre developed in the fourteenth century – from a sociolinguistic perspective, i.e. by highlighting differences in usage across various categories of characters, using the Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ). This paper will focus on the use of the particles ga and no with nominative and attributive functions and on the decline of kakari-musubi with koso in Toraakirabon (1642). The analysis will reveal that linguistic characterization is rendered not only through the lexicon, but also, as in the case of female characters, through a particular use of morphosyntactic structures, which appears less influenced by linguistic innovations.

This paper seeks to analyse the role of technology and memory in Kawakami Hiromi’s novel Ōkina torini sarawarenaiyō. Set thousands of years in the future, in a world that has been subjected to several catastrophes, the novel highlights the interconnections between humanity and technology in order to defamiliarize ideas of human centrality and exceptionalism. Kawakami’s characters are forced to face the cyclical possibility of human extinction, which turns into a recurring threat rather than an abstract and discrete event. In this narrative time chronically affected by crises, the definition of what it means to be human is constantly challenged and renegotiated, allowing for the development of non-anthropocentric forms of existence. This paper will demonstrate how, in a world in which the human species is chronically experiencing the threat of extinction, technologies – such as AI entities, clones and factories – allow the renegotiation of ideas of human centrality and singularity, effectively suggesting possibilities for survival outside of a humanist and anthropocentric framework.

This paper presents the experience of the design of a didactic activity for the translation of a Japanese video game in Italian, carried out in 2020 during the first year of the Japanese language course of the Master’s Degree Programme in Language and Civilisation of Asia and Mediterranean Africa at Ca’ Foscari University. The described protocol allows the design of video game translation sessions as a teaching activity, overcoming some typical technical and organisational problems. One important issue this paper addresses involves the possibility of reviewing the translation within the game, which is fundamental to understanding how to translate texts for this medium. The paper will also give an overview of the translation issues that students encountered during the activity and of how they solved them. Finally, the results of a survey will show whether the implemented protocol and classroom activity were satisfactory for the students and how they can be improved.

This paper aims to present the first preliminary results of The Changing Body and the Care Experience in Visual Arts in a Comparative and Cross-cultural Perspective Between Western and Mediterranean Art, a research project focused on the perception and representation of care in the MENA region (i.e. the Middle East and North Africa). In modern and contemporary artistic productions from the area, a reflection on the perception and visual representation of care must necessarily set out from the depiction of the body and illness, which plays a crucial role in any discourse on caring. The purpose of this paper is therefore to offer an initial overview of the visual representation of caring, and of the way in which it is understood in North Africa and Middle East, through the comparative analysis of some case studies.

This paper presents a text-based comparison between some elements of Indian Buddhism that are extant in Pāli, Sanskrit, and Chinese sources with some Tàijíquán 太極拳 principles drawn from the Tàijíquán jīng 太極拳經 ‘Classics of Tàijíquán’ in addition to some similar textual materials from both Tàijíquán 太極拳 and Qìgōng 氣功 traditions. Buddhist accounts in which body and mind’s interactions generate a perception of lightness (Pāli: lahu; Sanskrit: laghu/raghu; Chinese: qīng 輕) will be compared with descriptive and prescriptive Tàijíquán 太極拳 accounts in which the movement of the energy (qì 氣) in the body similarly produces a state of lightness (qīng 輕). The paper will also discuss some theoretical presuppositions to the act of comparison, starting with the reflections expressed by Jonathan Z. Smith.

The article sheds light on Chinese as a Second Language Learner Corpus Research, emphasising advances and lacks in this field. First, the paper describes the potential of learner corpora in the investigation of learner language. Second, it provides an overview of Chinese learner corpus-based research and reviews existing L2 Chinese learner corpora. The paper highlights the lack of L2 Chinese learner corpora collecting data from Italian learners. Therefore, it emphasises the importance of compiling corpora to conduct studies on the acquisition of L2 Chinese by learners whose L1s are other than English or Asian languages.

Fujiwara no Teika was a pivotal figure in classical Japanese poetry not only because of the many high-level poems he wrote or of the imperial anthologies he edited, but also because of his poetic treatises. In this paper, I will examine two of them: Kindai shūka (Superior Poems of Recent Times, 1209) and Eiga taigai (Fundamentals of Poetic Composition, after 1221). They both present a theoretical introduction followed by a selection of outstanding poems to be taken as examples by those who want to learn how to compose waka. The key feature of the anthology parts is to be found in the organisation of the poems, since they follow an order that respects the principles of association and of progression typical of the anthologies and of the sequences of the time. In this paper, I will compare these two treatises, with a focus on their similarities and differences. I will also try to understand, in the absence of explanatory notes by the author himself, what motivations might have induced the poet to modify what was stated in the introductory part and to reorganise the selection of the poems.

The aim of this paper is two-folded: 1) to discuss Modarres-e Reḍavi’s edition of Anvari’s divān in order to show that this edition, although still very valuable, should be used cautiously: even for non-philological, literary-oriented studies manuscripts should be checked. These should include not only the newly-discovered codices, not used by the editor, but also the manuscripts he used, which must be double-checked; 2) to give a solid starting point to any scholar attempting to investigate Anvari’s divān from a philological perspective, by showing in which areas Modarres-e Reḍavi’s edition is lacking and to what extent.

ʿĀqil Khān ‘Rāzī’ (c. 1026-1108 AH, c. 1617-1696 AD) is a seventeenth-century Indo-Persian poet, historian and statesman who authored a dīvān, some mystical treatises, a historical chronicle and a number of mas̲navīs. This paper focuses on two of his mas̲navīs, Mihr-u māh (1065 AH, 1654/55 AD) and Shamʿ-u parvāna (1064 AH, 1658/59 AD), which are adaptations/translations in Persian of two Neo-Indo-Aryan narrative poems written in Awadhī during the sixteenth century. The aim is to understand how ʿĀqil Khān adapted/translated these two South Asian texts in Persian. In order to achieve this objective, this study concentrates on the imagery of fire in the prologues and in the conclusions of the compositions. The intertextual elements are analysed, unveiling the literary process devised by ʿĀqil Khān ‘Rāzī’ to compose a complex layered text that could be enjoyed by the multilingual readership of seventeenth-century South Asia.

The available reconstruction systems of Old Chinese have proven to be indispensable tools for research in different fields, nevertheless, they remain flawed in many aspects and thus call for continuous refinement. Focusing on Baxter and Sagart’s reconstruction (2014), in this paper I will argue that a more systematic way of incorporating palaeographic data as an integral part of the methodology could enhance the reconstruction outcomes. In particular, the graphic forms preceding the kaishu 楷書 script of many characters and the frequent cases of phonetic borrowing in unearthed texts can provide considerable insightful data. Through some illustrative examples, I will contend that phonetic borrowings in excavated texts can provide insights for a) reconstructing items not included in current reconstructions; b) disentangling rhyme class mergers, and c) questioning and verifying the forms of items included in current reconstructions. A more porous boundary between the fields of palaeography and Chinese historical phonology could thus provide new data for answering many of the still open questions relating to Old Chinese.

This paper focuses on oft-overlooked vegan and vegetarian practices among contemporary Buddhist communities in Asia and Europe. It synthesises findings from a range of Buddhism-related contexts with an emphasis on transnational and Internet-based communities. Exploring multifaceted food imaginaries, foodways and placemaking practices, it argues that communities of engaged Buddhists, at different scales, deliberately resist mainstream food markets.

This paper offers a comparative overview of the expression of directed motion constructions in Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean, and explores the acquisition of these constructions by L1 Korean and L1 Chinese learners of Vietnamese, with a focus on the role of typological factors and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties in the acquisition process. This investigation not only provides valuable insights into the challenges faced by learners of L2 Vietnamese from diverse linguistic backgrounds but also enriches our understanding of the typology of motion events.

To what extent does the narrative of Japan’s prehistorical origins matter to Italy? In the second half of the twentieth century, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome hosted two significant exhibitions dedicated to Japanese archaeology and ancient art: Tesori dell’Arte Giapponese in 1958 and Il Giappone prima dell’Occidente in 1995. Both displays provided Italian visitors with an unparalleled framework to engage with early artistic manifestations of the archipelago known today as Japan. Built on a critical analysis of the prehistoric and protohistoric artefacts from the Jōmon to Kofun periods selected for the Italian audience, this paper examines the active application of narrative discourse on Japan’s identity by the Japanese government in Italy. Still, it also sheds light on the presence of Japanese archaeology and art in Italian public and private collections throughout the twentieth century. The analysis delves into the textual and visual presentation of exhibits, examining both the venue and catalogues. These sources offer insights into potential instances of orientalism or self-orientalism, revealing a narrative closely tied to stereotypical views. The investigation unravels aspects of Japan’s past emphasised in diplomatic shows, evolving alongside ground-breaking archaeological discoveries in post-war Japan.

This paper aims to analyse Elena Ferrante’s use of the metaphor of playing with dolls in her novel, La figlia oscura (The Lost Daughter). With a view of shedding a light on this issue, the first part of the paper will review the prominent essays of Sigmund Freud, Ernst Jentsch, Walter Benjamin, Rainer Maria Rilke and Charles Baudelaire that question the nature of playing with dolls in terms of psychology with various focuses. These essays generally agree on the fact that playing with dolls is a strong threshold to come to terms with the self, as well as on the fact that this coming to terms with the self is by nature not guaranteed. The second part will examine Elena Ferrante’s dealing with the problem of playing with dolls and her character’s journey to death and a possible psychological resurrection.

The aim of this paper is to take issue with the opinion that, in sociology, the concept of ‘society’ was equated with the nation-state. Firstly, a diachronic analysis of the term ‘society’, as used by the general public, shall be attempted: ‘society as a whole’ and ‘the social’. Secondly, the article shall illustrate that sociology has developed its own analytical concept of society within the space between the two lay terms. Thirdly, the fact that the process of globalisation yet again problematizes the distinction between ‘society as a whole’ and ‘the social’ shall be shown. The conclusion of the paper is that, by yet again, becoming aware of the three dimensions of the concept of ‘society’, we can provide cues for a theoretical reconstruction of the sociological concept of ‘society’ that will contribute to research on ‘society’ in the age of globalisation.

Between the 17th and 18th century the European ‘Republic of Letters’ was characterised by a great interest in the ‘Other’ and the fascination with different, ‘exotic’ cultures. In this cultural environment, the Jesuit missionaries in China acted as a ‘bridge’ between the two continents exchanging information and books from each side. This paper discusses the use of the concept of ‘agency’ as applied to Chinese books, analysing how they were subjected to actions and, in turn, were capable of action, in this specific European context. The aim of this paper is to reflect how the agency of these texts conflicts and coincides with the agency of other actors connected with this trans-cultural process.

Focusing on Vivian Qu’s Angels Wear White (2017), this paper uses Judith Butler’s discussion of vulnerability, resistance, and performativity as a theoretical framework to analyse the film’s narrative and directing choices when addressing issues of sexual assault on minors and genders norms in contemporary China. The film’s depiction of social inequalities, economic precariousness, corruption, and the construction and performance of femininity demonstrates the way Chinese women are vulnerable to violence – sexual or not – and to gender norms they are expected to conform to, without falling into the trap of paternalism and victimisation.

This paper aims to redefine and negotiate the boundaries of Taiwan’s identity through an examination of historical films, delving into its complexity and fragility. It begins by providing a contextualisation of Taiwanese historical films. It then proceeds to compare narrative styles between the 1980s Taiwan New Cinema and 2010s films, tracing the transition from one historical interpretation to another. Lastly, it argues for a distinct narrative style in the 2010s, citing examples from feature films and documentaries. This study contributes to the understanding of Taiwan’s multifaceted national identity and the role of cinema in shaping it.

Japanese ODA has attracted much attention in the last three decades. This paper aims to shed light on the intellectual evolution of the official discourse on Japanese ODA based on the analysis of two main ‘modes of thought’ at the foundation of it, namely national interest and international affiliation. Based on a detailed content analysis of official documents and public debates, the paper will take the role of institutional actors – Japanese political leaders, foreign ministers and intellectuals – into consideration. The role of such “entrepreneurs” has been crucial for shaping the current official discourse on Japanese foreign aid. The paper will argue, in fact, that the official discourse is a juxtaposition of two clashing ideas carefully shaped to enlarge the consensus (both domestic and external) toward the Japanese government’s policies.

In his treatise on Persian literary theory, al-Muʿǧam fī maʿāyīr ašʿār al-ʿaǧam, Šams-i Qays (13th century) claims that a poem without the main rhyming letter (ravī) is not a poem. However, this letter is not the only recurring letter at the end of the lines of a Persian poem. Šams-i Qays discusses eight other letters (ridf, qayd, taʾsīs, daxīl, vaṣl, xurūǧ, mazīd, and nāyira) as he determines the length and the possible patterns of a Persian rhyme (qāfiya). In this paper, I aim to improve our understanding of the linguistic rationale behind the taxonomy of Persian rhyming letters by providing an annotated Italian translation of relevant passages from the Muʿǧam.

Popular fiction was a particularly successful trend in fiction from the late Qing era through the Republican period. In this fiction, a nostalgic and sentimental preservation of the Ming-Qing cult of qing 情 is clearly visible: romance and freedom of love are the expressions of a modern consciousness which makes individuals out of subjects of the traditional moral code. In a circular move to find solutions to national salvation and social change, sentimental literature searched for a compromise between tradition and modernity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the Aufhebung of the old contributed to accommodate a still unchartered modernity in two short stories by Bao Tianxiao. The intertextual analysis will show the development of a persistent ambivalence between progress and nostalgia.

This paper looks at two different manifestations of workers’ poetry as a literary tradition: the poetry of workers, peasants and soldiers (gongnongbing 工农兵) and migrant workers’ poetry (dagong shige 打工诗歌) Through a comparison between three issues of Shikan 诗刊 (Poetry Monthly) from 1976 and an anthology of migrant worker’s poetry published in 2007, this study explores some of the most relevant differences between the two in terms of aesthetics and content, before addressing questions about the shifts in the positioning of workers’ poetry vis-à-vis the political and literary authority in China.

This paper aims to analyse A Lover’s Discourse (2020), a novel by Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo, comparing it to A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1978) by Roland Barthe and examining to what degree the French linguist and semiotician has influenced the author’s work. The discourse between lovers developed by Guo resembles that of Barthes on a structural, linguistic, and thematic level, but is set in an intercultural and multilingual context. By reframing the discourse as such, Xiaolu Guo contemplates themes of love, wordlessness, and home, connected to the migrant’s experience.

While predominantly seen as a technical process, environmental planning is in fact largely shaped by cultural and ideological factors. Ecolinguistics offers a coherent approach to analyse these elements, by unearthing their linguistic traces and exposing how they naturalize social-ecological goals. So far, limited efforts have gone into developing tools for a systematic ecolinguistic analysis of Chinese texts informing environmental decision-making. This paper seeks to address this gap, by introducing a novel ecolinguistic framework and the results of its application on a Chinese Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report.

The sōshoku kofun 装飾古墳 (decorated tombs) is a phenomenon of protohistoric art that developed during the Late Kofun Period (475‑710 CE) from Northern Kyūshū. This paper will discuss the data personally gathered from the iconographic and iconological analysis of the subject of the boat in seventeen sōshoku kofun in Northern Kyūshū, i.e. the present‑day prefectures of Fukuoka, Saga, and Nagasaki. The aim of this research is to understand how the subject of the boat developed artistically in this particular phenomenon of protohistoric art, why the boat was reproduced in a funerary context, and what information on the behind culture can be obtained by analysing the style, the iconography, and the links the subject of the boat has with both local and mainland symbolism.

The paper focuses on Japanese female photographers in international art exhibitions. Until recently, Japan’s photographic field was predominantly male‑dominated. Traditionally, women were considered incompetent with technical equipment and this long-enduring stereotype limited them to passive roles as models. However, from the late 1980s/early 1990s, a shift occurred, with female photographers gaining prominence. In parallel, the representation of Japanese women artists in international venues started to rise and more names began circulating in the global art circuits. This essay inspects in particular one of the most important events on the scene: the Art Biennale in Venice, the oldest and most prestigious of these large-scale exhibitions. Two important shows, held respectively in 2005 and 2009 at the Japan pavilion of the Venice Biennale, provide the starting point for this analysis: they were the only exhibitions ever dedicated to women photographers by the pavilion in its 70‑year‑old history. The artworks of Ishiuchi Miyako and Yanagi Miwa were showcased, two of the most important women photographers in recent years.

Due to the growing importance of people-to-people diplomacy in China’s global strategies, this is a momentous time for China’s international development volunteering. Drawing from underexploited Chinese sources, the paper shows that international volunteering has the potential for enhancing China’s public appeal globally and giving a ‘softer’ connotation to China’s aid to Africa. In this paper the policy, practices, and discourses about China’s voluntary service are examined and framed within the context of China’s soft power strategies. Moreover, the recent domestic debate on shortcomings of the ‘China Foreign Aid Youth Volunteers Program’ in Africa and the new directions suggested to the country’s leadership by influential Chinese academics are critically analysed. The focus is on the tailoring of a new political and ideological ‘space’ for the Chinese NGOs as implementers of future international volunteering programs. In spite of considerable debates and evolutions, Chinese international volunteering programs seems to remain under tight state control and to be best understood as social engineering efforts, with China’s soft power as their main objective.

The present paper is part of a larger project promoted by the University RomaTre on translations of Greek Patristic Texts (2nd-6th century CE) in the Latin and Syriac sources, between the 3rd and the 8th century CE. In this paper I give priority to the analysis of the cultural context of the Syriac monasticism without neglecting the more important aspect of evaluation. Some of these aspects are connected to the relationship between the hagiographic production and the historiographical tradition. This relationship is clarified, not only from the reconstruction of the manuscript tradition, but also from the opportunity to capture certain problems present in the preparatory phase of the heterogeneous Lausiac material. Therefore, their manuscript tradition must be analysed for each individual case. After a brief presentation of the status quaestionis of the studies conducted on Palladius’ text, the paper focuses on some aspects of this tradition that help us better understand the historical and cultural environment. The first aspect concerns the problem of the transmission of texts in monastic circles, the second aspect regards the original choices of Syriac translators.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the different effects that each medium (literature-cinema) may have on the experience of its readers and audience – what that medium is trying to cultivate, the limitations of each and how all of them in different ways bring greater attention to the historical phenomenon of the Armenian Genocide. With a focus on the renowned Italian-Armenian novelist Antonia Arslan’s Genocide narrative Skylark Farm the paper will first discuss the literary genre as an instrument that brings greater attention to the historical memory and then will focus on the theme of the Armenian Genocide in cinema and will deal with the dramatized version of the Skylark Farm by the Italian directors, the Taviani brothers.

The Armenian Genocide is still the object of a hard denial in the official attitude of Turkey's government and political circles. The Turkish term used to define what happened to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, in 1915, is tehcir meaning expulsion or deportation. The increasing pressure of international media, of public opinion and of the recognition process of the Armenian Genocide by a growing number of states induced, in recent years, the Turkish authotities to sustain the thesis that being a historical question, the issue of the Armenian Genocide must be discussed and resolved by historians. It happens however that, if a Turkish historian affirms the factuality of the Armenian Genocide, this can cause him/her serious problems. Hence the question seems to be entrapped in a deadlock. The paper wants to be an attempt to analyse some principles, factors and methodologies, which can help in showing a possible way out from the deadlock. It tries to elaborate some theoretical, practical and concrete proposals that will get the discussants on the way. It also examines some specific problems and hardships, which either side faces, and seeks to indicate ways that might be helpful, and tasks that might be necessary in order to overcome them. The main questions the paper faces are: the conceptual/semantic relation between genocide and tehcir in the Armenian case, the issue of trauma and the overcoming of trauma, and going beyond recognition.

The existing studies on language uses and practices in Arab digital media mainly focus on few Mashreq countries and, as far as the Maghreb is concerned, mostly on Morocco and Algeria, while very limited attention has been devoted to other countries of the Arab West such as Tunisia. This paper will analyse some passages of news broadcasting taken from four Tunisian social media radio broadcasters, uploaded as videos on the Facebook pages of the selected radio stations, based in the Tunisian Sahel, i.e. Mahdia, Msaken, and Sousse. The data presented and analysed are taken from different information programmes. The aim is to try to describe and analyse the linguistic choices of the speakers, influenced by personal and contextual elements, such as the editorial line of a radio, in order to verify whether there is a general tendency among the radio stations or if some peculiarities can be identified. In particular, the role of Tunisian Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic will be highlighted, as well as that of any possible mixed varieties occurring in the examples offered.

Al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī is a hero of the Islamic history who stands against the oppressor for the sake of justice. His tragic death has been a major theme in Shiʿi literature, but he is highly esteemed also in Sunni Islam, especially in Egypt. This paper aims to present the other – less known – al-Ḥusayn through the literary representations made by Egyptian writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, who have read this transhistorical figure according to the political and social environment that they lived in. The martyr has become eternal symbol of resistance and struggle and a narrative lens to talk freely about the political events that upset Republican Egypt.

The chapter on the ravī (the last ‘letter’ of the rhyme), from the work al-Muʿğam fī maʿāyīr ašʿār al-ʿağam by Šams-i Qays (13th century), is deemed the earliest and more prestigious extant text describing the rules concerning the rhyme (qāfiya) in Persian verses. It focuses on the identification of the pivotal rhyming letter (ravī), that is the last segment of the rhyming word, around which the rhyme of a poem is built. In discussing this topic, Šams-i Qays touches on linguistic issues and gives a list of Persian suffixed morphemes for the first time. The present paper offers a new annotated translation of the section on the ravī from al-Muʿğam; it aims to clarify difficult passages and examples, highlight text inconsistencies, and identify several lines of poetry occurring in the text.

In the light of several previous studies, this contribution aims to introduce the study of Neẓāmi’s poetics through the reading of his poems but specifically through the verses dedicated to his reflection on the soḵan. In this first essay, we start from the reading and analysis of two chapters from Maḵzan al-asrār explicitly dedicated to this subject. The paper proposes a brief introduction to place the two chapters in their more general context, the translation of the 93 verses and a brief thematic and rhetorical analysis of their development, which represents the theoretical-aesthetic premise for all his later works.

This paper aims to retrace a piece of the history of Oriental Studies in Rome and, more broadly, in Italy in the first years of the 20th century. Starting from unpublished documents, it chronicles the events related to the establishment of the Oriental School at the University of Rome (1904) and the subsequent reorganisation effort its professors – directed by I. Guidi – had hoped for. This attempt was the occasion for F.L. Pullé, in his role of member of the High Council for Public Education, to draw up a detailed report on Italian Oriental Studies which put forth a series of concrete proposals for a more general renewal of this field. In addition to allowing a better understanding of the history of Roman – and, more generally, Italian – Oriental Studies, the events recounted herein are emblematic of a broader effort, sustained by the same Orientalists since the mid-nineteenth century, to give a recognisable identity and a unitary orientation to a diverse group of disciplines.

The Mekong region presents a record incidence of cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer). Scientists identify correlations between the development of this aggressive disease and the consumption of raw fish in local dishes. While made aware of these correlations by comprehensive health campaigns, some villagers in Thailand’s notoriously neglected Northeast refuse to cook the fish before consumption: a phenomenon that puzzles medical experts and policy makers. Based on ethnographic data, this paper suggests that practices surrounding the consumption of raw food in the area have become taboo. Rather than disappearing, they now play a key role in bonding rituals where rural masculinities are expressed via spectacles of risk taking that transgress normative ideals of manhood as epitomised by urban men and Buddhist monks.

This paper examines the close relationship between alcoholic beverages and politics in the Tang dynasty (618‑907 AD), starting with the way in which Chinese people categorised various types of beverages. Through the terminology used to denote Chinese alcohol (jiǔ) and its two opposing physical and psychological effects, the Chinese realised that it could also have numerous beneficial and harmful effects on political life. As a result, jiǔ was an important player in the Chinese imperial political scene, playing a variety of roles there, examples of which were given in large numbers in the Zizhi tongjia.

Self-killing in late imperial and modern China called into play gender disparities, and secular and religious morals often at odds with each other. Scholarship has long focused on Confucian virtue ethics that led young widows to follow their husband to death, or take a chastity vow and disfigure themselves to avoid rape, but little effort has been made to examine suicide practices cross-culturally. This paper compares such practices among Han women from the southeast coast and indigenous Naxi and Lahu women of upland Yunnan, throwing light on the aesthetics behind their struggles for justice, free-choice marriage and beliefs in posthumous love.

In the Chinese linguistic tradition, the term ‘structural particle(s)’ (jiégòu zhùcí 结构助词) is used to refer to functional elements that mainly act as markers of adnominal modification, nominalisation, adverbial modification and in the so-called verb complement constructions. In Standard Mandarin, the three commonly used structural particles are all realised as /tə/, but they are written with different characters (的, 地 and 得), which somehow reflect their distinct origins. However, the same functions are mapped onto different markers in other Sinitic languages, and each of the functions listed above may be associated to more than one construction. In this paper, we provide an overview of the range of variation in the domain of structural particles in Sinitic, based on the analysis of a convenience sample of 77 Chinese dialects. We highlight some areal and genealogical trends in the distribution of these forms, and we discuss some hypotheses on their origins and on their evolution: specifically, we focus on the markers of adnominal and adverbial modification. We argue that markers of adnominal and adverbial modification may sometimes arise from different sources and undergo formal merger, due to structural analogy and/or to phonetic similarity.

In the mid‑nineteenth century, the missionaries of the London Missionary Society founded the journal Liuhe congtan 六合叢談. Its varied contents included a recurring column titled “Western Literature” in English and Xixue shuo 西學說 (Explanations on Western learning) in Chinese. The section’s editor, Joseph Edkins, used it to inform Chinese readers about Greco‑Roman antiquity and its most important thinkers and writers. The role of literature in the spread of Western learning to China has not yet received much attention. This paper will analyse Edkins’ columns, his motives for writing them, and the topics he considered worthy of publication. This will give us insight into the cultural strategies the missionaries adopted in the era between the Opium Wars and also shed some light on the development of terms like Western Learning, philosophy and literature.

Established in 1933 during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan (1895‑1945) and rediscovered only in the 1980s, Le Moulin poetry society marked the beginning of Modernism in Taiwan. Drawing from Nishiwaki Junzaburō’s Surrealist poetry and the Japanese School of the New Sensibilities, the group, led by the poet Yang Chichang 楊熾昌, fostered a new poetic style to depict the solitude of modern life as well as the hardship of colonialism. The paper aims to analyse the emergence of Taiwan Modernism in the 1930s through the rediscovery of Le Moulin’s poetry and the translation of some of Yang Chichang’s most representative poems.

The literary relations, publishing and translation activity between Romania and China have been heavily influenced by the international exchange between the countries. The overall objective of the present research is to analyse literary translations from China to Romania between 1950-2018 from the point of view of cultural reception and to explore what this strategy involves at a larger scale. The first section of the paper will present a concise mapping of the Romanian publishing activity related to China, highlighting the influence of socio-political-economic relations between the countries which emerges from both quantitative and qualitative research results. The second section will present the results of a series of interviews with intermediary agents focusing on the cultural reflections of Chinese literature in Romania.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the syntactic status of Korean GenPs and the thematic hierarchy according to the linear order of arguments realised by them in the noun phrases. First, I tried to examine the argument structure and the linearity represented by the Korean GenPs after clarifying some restrictions for the optional and obligatory realisation of Korean genitive Case marker -uy and the linearity of their thematic roles. Second, after critically reviewing the previous analyses of the syntactic status of the Korean genitive Case marker -uy, I analysed it as an element that can be placed in specifier position of functional structure FP which is postulated between NP and DP. Finally, through this analysis, I tried to explain the thematic hierarchy of the Korean GenPs along with the semantic ambiguities caused by structural differences within a well-articulated syntactic structure of DP proposed by Cinque (2010).

This paper presents an overview of the origins and development of research into various types of arms and armour used in Tibet from approximately the fifteenth century to the early twentieth century. Incorporated into this are a brief survey of well recognised examples and a review of the wide multiplicity of rare and less familiar forms, including helmets, armour for men and horses, swords, and firearms, many of which have only come to light over the past twenty-five years.

Although the government established through the alliance of the Gélukpa (Dge lugs pa) and the Khoshud in 1642 took its appellation from the Ganden Palace (Dga’ ldan pho brang/Ganden Phodrang) at Drepung (’Bras spung), the symbolic seat of power of this government was the Potala, at the same time fortress, administrative centre, earthly copy of the celestial palace of Avalokiteśvara, and official residence of the Fifth Dalai Lama. Less known, however, is that the Potala also came to symbolise military readiness. It acquired this new martial function in 1667, when an armoury, called Dorjéling (Rdo rje gling), was set up at the base of the White Palace. The Fifth Dalai Lama memorialised its establishment with a poetic text, which is included in volume nineteen (ma) of his collected works. This paper examines this text, which provides information both on the contents of the armoury and on the logic employed to justify the creation of spaces dedicated to military preparedness within a palace that was fast becoming one of the most revered sites in the Tibetan sphere.