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Paper has become the most common writing material worldwide in the course of a two millennia history. This study provides a magisterial synthesis of recent scholarship and original insights into the origins of papermaking and its subsequent history in imperial China, including a wide range of archaeological evidence and literary sources. The volume introduces the materials and technologies of paper production and presents the cultural history of paper in traditional China. A comprehensive survey of literary sources on the production and use of paper is undertaken starting with the ongoing debate about the origin and genesis of paper, which was fuelled by recent archaeological discoveries of paper or proto-paper from the last two centuries BCE. In addition to its having become a popular writing material produced in many different qualities for both handwriting and printing, it also served as a material for wrapping or decorating, money and numerous uses in everyday life, such as umbrellas, windows, clothing, wallpapers, curtains and kites. Precious paper contributed to the aesthetics of calligraphy and painting, catering to the taste of the educated elite and artists.

This book, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munshi, is the most comprehensive, multi-disciplinary studies on Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, widely known as Munshi Abdullah (1796-1854). He was a prominent literary figure and thinker in the Malay world in the 19th century and was also an early'pioneer'of Singapore.The author, Professor Hadijah Rahmat, has spent more than 25 years studying Munshi Abdullah since her PhD studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 1992 to date. This book is covered in two volumes and is based on her research conducted using unexplored primary sources at several missionaries'archives at SOAS, London, Houghton Library, University Harvard, Library of Congress, Leiden University, KITVL, Holland, and the Perpustakaan Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta.The book consists of numerous academic papers presented at the regional and international seminars, and also published in international journals and as chapters of books. Besides academic papers, the excerpt of play titled Munsyi, sketches, poetry, and song, and interviews by the national media are also included.This book provides new insight into Abdullah's life, backgrounds, writings, his influences and legacies and the reactions and thought provoking views of the western and eastern scholars on Abdullah. The book is indeed the key reference for studies on Munshi Abdullah, Malay literature, and the history of Singapore, Malaysia, and colonialism in Southeast Asia.

This volume focuses on the theatre history of Asian countries, and discusses the specific context of theatre modernization in Asia. While Asian theatre is one of the primary interests within theatre scholarship in the world today, knowledge of Asian theatre history is very limited and often surprisingly incorrect. Therefore, this volume addresses a major gap in contemporary theatre studies. The volume discusses the conflict between tradition and modernity in theatre, suggesting that the problems of modernity are closely related to the idea of tradition. Although Asian countries preserved the traditional form and values of their respective theatres, they had to also confront the newly introduced values or mechanisms of European modernity. Several papers in this volume therefore provide critical surveys of the history of theatre modernization in Asian countries or regions—Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India Malaysia, Singapore, and Uyghur. Other papers focus on specific case studies of the history of modernization, discussing contemporary Taiwanese performances, translations of modern French comedy into Chinese, the modernization of Chinese Xiqu, modern Okinawan plays, Malaysian traditional performances, Korean national theatre, and Japanese plays during World War II. Renowned academics and theatre critics have contributed to this volume, making it a valuable resource for researchers and students of theatre studies, literature, and cultural studies.

In China the tradition of a book society is longer than anywhere else in the world. Chinese paper making, calligraphy and woodblock printing date from very early ages, but have for a very long time remained almost unknown to the Western world. At the IFLA satellite meeting “Chinese Written and Printed Cultural Heritage and Library Work” in Hangzhou in 2006 the richness of present day book historical research and library activities in China has been presented by more than sixty papers. This fine selection reflects the width and depth of this extremely important and immense Chinese heritage.

While many of us may strive to locate a sense of identity and belonging expressed via a home or ancestral homeland; today, however, this connection is no longer, if it ever was, a straightforward identification. This collection aims at mapping narratives or artwork of home/homeland that present shared, private, multifaceted, and often contested experiences of place, especially in the context of today's migrations and upheavals, along with alarming degrees of increased nativism, racism, and anti-Asian violence. This volume includes papers by artists, filmmakers, and comparative scholars from diverse disciplines of literature, cinema, art history, cultural studies, and gender studies. Our goal is to help literary and art historian scholars in Asian diaspora studies, better decolonize and open up traditional research methodologies, curricula, and pedagogies.

William Elliot Griffis (1843 – 1928) graduated from Rutgers College in 1869 and taught four years in Fukui and Tokyo. After his return to the United States, he devoted himself to his research and writing on East Asia throughout his life. He authored 20 books about Japan and five books about Korea including, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882), Corea, Without and Within: Chapters on Corean History, Manners and Religion (1885), The Unmannerly Tiger, and Other Korean Tales (1911), A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Appenzeller (1912), and Korean Fairy Tales (1922). In particular, his bestseller, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882) was reprinted numerous times through nine editions over thirty years. He was not only known as'the foremost interpreter of Japan to the West before World War I but also the American expert on Korea. After his death, his collection of books, documents, photographs and ephemera was donated to Rutgers. The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.

The interest among Victorian readers in classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well documented. Yet this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like'Kalidasa'and'Firdusi'were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women's book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. But for the most part, such readers were not consulting the specialist publications of scholarly orientalists. What then were the translations that catalysed these intercultural encounters? Based on a unique methodology marrying translation theory with empirical techniques developed by historians of reading, this book shines light for the first time on the numerous amateur translators or'popularizers', who were responsible for making these texts accessible and disseminating them to the Victorian general readership. Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf explains the process whereby popular translations were written, published, distributed to bookshops and libraries, and ultimately consumed by readers. It uses the working papers and correspondence of popularizers to demonstrate their techniques and motivations, while the responses of contemporary readers are traced through the pencil marginalia they left behind in dozens of original copies. In spite of their typically limited knowledge of source-languages, Asian Classics argues that popularizers produced versions more respectful of the complexity, cultural difference, and fundamental untranslatability of Asian texts than the professional orientalists whose work they were often adapting. The responses of their readers, likewise, frequently deviated from interpretive norms, and it is proposed that this combination of eccentric translators and unorthodox readers triggered'flights of translation', whereby historical individuals can be seen to escape the hegemony of orientalist forms of knowledge.

This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume's essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.

China's strong economic growth occurring alongside modernization across the great majority of Asian societies has created what many see as a transnational space through and by which not only economic, social and cultural resources, but also threats and crises flow over traditional political boundaries. The first section of the work lays out a clear conceptual framework. It draws on arguments about nation no longer being the only container of society, about trans-disciplinary thinking, and about knowledge being context-bound. It identifies and discusses distinctive features of China and Asia in the global era. These include population, urbanization and climate change; the continuing reach of Orientalist shadows; cultural politics of knowledge. It closes by arguing how global studies adds value to existing accounts. The second, and longer, section applies this framework through a series of original empirical case-studies in three areas: migration/poverty/gender; culture/education; well-being. Both the conceptual framework and case-studies are drawn from research presented at HKBU since 2011 under the auspices of the Global Social Sciences Conference Series and supplemented by additional papers.

Publication entitled The Contemporary Arab World. Literary and Linguistic Issues was designed and written by the members of staff of the Department of Arabic Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. It shows results of the research linked to their scholarly and didactic interests. It is a collection of six papers dealing with selected issues in the field of Arabic language and literature, focused on phenomena and processes taking place in contemporary Arab world.Teaching Arabic as a foreign language faces many methodological challenges connected with the specificity and complexity of the sociolinguistic situation in the Arabic world. They mostly concern the necessity for considering different types (registers) of the language, distinguishing, understanding and using which makes it possible for learners to achieve full communication skills.The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century brought above all a new look at the didactic process, forcing revision of the traditional grammar–translation method in teaching foreign languages. Higher education schools must cope with new problems connected with their functioning on the broad market of formal and informal education, which is determined by the term “success on the job market”. Needs and expectations of learners change. Which direction will development of Arabic Studies take then? How to bring together the mission of higher education institutions and pragmatic needs of the market, or current needs of “consumers” and guidelines of central curricula. Is such compromise possible?

The Handbook of Japanese Contrastive Linguistics is a unique publication that brings together insights from three traditions—Japanese linguistics, linguistic typology and contrastive linguistics—and makes important contributions to deepening our understanding of various phenomena in Japanese as well other languages of the globe. Its primary goal is to uncover principled similarities and differences between Japanese and other languages of the globe and thereby shed new light on the universal as well as language-particular properties of Japanese. The issues addressed by the papers in this volume cover a wide spectrum of phenomena ranging from lexical to syntactic and discourse levels. The authors of the chapters, leading scholars in their respective field of research, present the state-of-the-art research from their respected field.

Engage and explore readings from a multi-religious, globalized, multicultural region The papers in this collection were presented at the third meeting of the Society of Asian Biblical Studies held at the Sabah Theological Seminary, Malaysia in 2012. The essays represent the work of women/feminist scholars in biblical hermeneutics in this region who have raised questions against traditional, male-centered interpretations, offering distinct perspectives based on their experiences of pain, subjugation, and a forced sacrificial philosophy of life. Features: Articles focused on finding justice for women through dialogue with biblical texts Reflections on migration, diaspora, displacement, discrimination, and conditions generated by poverty and systemic oppression Five essays from women in China, Japan, and Korea

This book is of value to anyone interested in language-cultural issues in the reception of Chinese literature in this globalized world. The papers cover a wide range of topics, from detailed analysis of specific translated texts to broader issues related to the impact of culture on translation — with translation being seen as having an important role in cultural transmission. The complexity of translation across cultures is highlighted, emphasizing the need for translators not only to have a sound knowledge of the contextual background for understanding the original meaning but also to consider creative adaptation to ensure comprehension by an international readership.

Postcolonial literatures can be defined as the body of creative work written by authors whose lands were formerly subjugated to colonial rule. In previous volumes of this series, the research literature of former British colonies Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand have been addressed. This volume offers guidance for those researching the postcolonial literature of the former British colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Among the forty nations represented in this volume are South Africa, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Jamaica, Swaziland, Belize, and Namibia. With the exception of South Africa (which formed the Union of South Africa in 1910), this guide picks up its coverage in 1947, when both India and Pakistan gained their independence. The literature created by writers from these nations represents the diverse experiences in the postcolonial condition and are the subject of this book. The volume provides best-practice suggestions for the research process and discusses how to take advantage of primary text resources in a variety of formats, both digital and paper based: bibliographies, indexes, research guides, archives, special collections, and microforms.

This book examines Chinese traditional poetry with an emphasis on the sources of pleasure in creating and appreciating classical Chinese poems and the basis for valid aesthetic judgments about poetry.The pleasure derived from art plays a crucial role in people's evaluation of its worth. This book shows that Chinese classical poetics and Western aesthetics agree on the sources of aesthetic pleasure. Both hold, despite their obvious differences, that aesthetic taste essentially involves cognition. The book explores important ideas in traditional Chinese poetry, emphasizing that “Poetry is founded upon the power of judgement (shi).” This central idea guides other key concepts throughout the history of Chinese poetics, revealing the fundamental principles of creating and appreciating poetic art. The author presents new views of traditional Chinese poetry and poetics by unifying these long-dispersed basic propositions into a new coherent cognitivist framework that also gives due importance to emotion.Scholars and students studying Chinese literature, poetics, philosophy of art, and philosophy of mind will find this book interesting.

This is the first book written by Chinese scholars with more accurate interpretation of Master Xun's philosophy and quoted texts from other Chinese classics. Master Xun is one of the greatest Confucian philosophers of the classical period in China. His thought has been exercising a profound impact on ideology, academic research, social and political system, ritual and moral principles, as well as the practical aspects of personal self-cultivation, education and learning. After reading the book, the readers will understand thoroughly the ancient Chinese philosophy.

This book has been groundbreaking for scholars of the Cultural Revolution, but hitherto was only available in Japanese and Chinese. This edition allows English-language readers to access the work for the first time. The author explains how political struggles within the state, competing sectarian interests, and other complex factors intertwined to produce various forms of collective violence that had a major impact on the political, economic, and social order of the time.

The essays in this volume constitute an exceptionally broad and inclusive account of Chinese literature and performing arts since 1949. Extending beyond fiction to poetry and drama, and covering song, opera, and film as well, these essays reveal a more lively and varied cultural life than that disclosed by studies confined to fiction and literary politics. Rather than stopping at the assumption that art reflects Party or government policy, the essays uncover the traditional roots of popular literature and performing art by employing literary and artistic methods of analysis. While often lacking in appeal to Western audiences, these popular arts nonetheless have their own artistic validity and convey complex meanings to broadly based Chinese audiences. The materials and analyses presented here have social as well as cultural relevance. Variety and change rather than monolithic uniformity have characterized post-1949 cultural bureaucracies, writers, performers, and audiences. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

Breaking through the long-established image of Heian Japan (794–1185) as a culture dominated by ritualized aristocratic values, Yung-Hee Kim presents a picture of a country in transition, filled with a wide variety of common people responding to very ordinary situations. The court does not disappear, but rather becomes part of a larger society inhabited by Buddhist nuns and mountain ascetics, farmers and fishermen, beggars and gamblers. In popular songs called imayo, they express their concerns about religion, love, aging, and even current affairs. In 1179 Emperor Go-Shirakawa compiled a collection of this song genre, which had flourished for two centuries. His twenty-volume anthology, Ryojin hisho, circulated until the middle of the fourteenth century, when it disappeared completely. To the astonishment of the scholarly world, two volumes reappeared early in the twentieth century. It is these texts—a small remnant of a powerful popular literature—that Kim makes accessible to English-speaking readers. Ryojin hisho juxtaposes the sacred with the profane, the high with the low, the male with the female, the old with the new. The songs, in translations that faithfully reflect the sounds and images of the originals, make up the core of this book. They are surrounded by a wealth of material on the imayo genre, the women who sang the songs, the role of court patronage, and other aspects of Heian culture. Far from simply surviving as an aesthetic artifact, the anthology comes to life in its own literary and cultural context. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.Mukhopadhyay's account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier's manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women's literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.

This volume will be the first full-length exploration in any language of the details of the history of the Japanese language written by experts in the different subfields of linguistics. Overall, while including factual and background information, the volume will focus on presenting original research of lasting value. This includes presenting the latest research on better studied topics, such as segmental phonology, accent or focus constructions, as well as both introducing areas of study which have traditionally been underrepresented, such as syntax or kanbun materials, and showing how they contribute to a fuller understanding of all of the history of Japanese.

Environment and Narrative in Vietnam brings together essays about Vietnam's natural environments and environmental crises from the perspective of culture, with particular attention to narrative templates that have shaped perceptions and interactions with nature on the part of different communities. The essays in this volume explore theoretical problems in the assessment of ecological stewardship and attitudes toward nature across cultures. They focus on both majority (Kinh) and ethnic minority narratives about nature and seek to outline how different ideas of modernization, from the French colonial project to the Marxist understanding of nature on the part of the Communist government, have shaped perceptions, policies, and activism regarding the environment. The essays also highlight the tensions and confluences between nationalist nation-building projects and economic integration into global markets for environmental thinking over the last half-century, and they analyze how texts from literary fiction to contemporary news media represent different environmental cultures in Vietnam. Taken together, the essays in Environment and Narrative in Vietnam begin to fill a significant gap in the understanding of environmental cultures in Asia and in the Environmental Humanities. This is an open access book.

Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture: The Limits of Empathy and Cosmopolitan Imagination looks at the myriad ways in which disaster events (both man-made and natural) are perceived and represented in South Asian literature and culture. This book explores the affective mechanisms of empathy and imaginary identification which are conditioned and reiterated by biopolitical statist regimes of power to preempt and coopt any radical agential or cognitive intervention which might be evinced by the event of the disaster. The contributors also examine South Asian disasters vis-a-vis the registers of ecological crises, migration events, civil and liberation wars, and pandemics to understand the multifarious ways in which such ‘disasters'are used as tropes to peddle certain structures of interpellation in the collective consciousness.

In what ways can or should art engage with its social context? Authors, readers, and critics have been preoccupied with this question since the dawn of modern literature in Korea. Advocates of social engagement have typically focused on realist texts, seeing such works as best suited to represent injustices and inequalities by describing them as if they were before our very eyes.Christopher P. Hanscom questions this understanding of political art by examining four figures central to recent Korean fiction, film, and public discourse: the migrant laborer, the witness to or survivor of state violence, the refugee, and the socially excluded urban precariat. Instead of making these marginalized figures intelligible to common sense, this book reveals the capacity of art to address the “impossible speech” of those who are not asked, expected, or allowed to put forward their thoughts, yet who in so doing expand the limits of the possible.Impossible Speech proposes a new approach to literature and film that foregrounds ostensibly “nonpolitical” or nonsensical moments, challenging assumptions about the relationship between politics and art that locate the “politics” of the work in the representation of content understood in advance as being political. Recasting the political as a struggle over the possibility or impossibility of speech itself, this book finds the politics of a work of art in its power to confront the boundaries of what is sayable.

This book offers a critical analysis of global mobilities across China and Italy in history. In three periods in the twentieth century, new patterns of physical mobilities and cultural contact were established between the two countries which were either novel at the time of their emergence or impactful on subsequent periods. The first two chapters provide overviews of writings by Italians in China and by Chinese in Italy in the twentieth century. The remaining chapters cover: Republican China's relationships with Italy and Italian Fascist colonialism in China during the 1920s–1930s; Italian travelers to China during the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1970s; migrations between China and Italy during the 2000s–2010s. In analyzing these cultural mobilities, this book opens a new line of inquiry in Chinese-Italian Cultural Studies, which has been dominated by historical study, and contributes a significant case study to the scholarship on global cultural mobilities.

This book is the first collection to showcase the flourishing field of environmental humanities in Central Asia. A region larger than Europe, Central Asia possesses an astounding range of environments, from deserts to glaciated peaks.The volume brings into conversation scholarship from history to social anthropology, demonstrating the contribution that interdisciplinary and engaged research offers to many urgent issues in the region: from the history of conservationism to the tactics of environmental movements, from literary engagements with ‘pure nature'to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. The collection focuses on the Central Asian republics of the former USSR, where a complex layering of nomadic and sedentary, Turkic and Persianate, Islamic and Soviet cultures ends up affecting human relations with distinct environments. Featuring state-of-the-art contributions, the book enquires into human-environment relations through a broad-brush typology of interactive modes: to extract, protect, enspirit and fear. Broadening the scope of analysis beyond a consideration of power, the authors bring into focus alternative local cosmologies and the unintended consequences of environmental policy. The volume highlights scholarship from within Central Asia as well as expertise elsewhere, offering readers diverse modes of knowledge-production in the environmental humanities.This book is an important resource for researchers and students of the environmental humanities, sustainability, history, politics, anthropology and geography of Asia, as well as Soviet and Post-Soviet studies.Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Mayasari-Hoffert examines the depiction of the Left in Indonesian literature since the anti-leftist purge in 1965. With close textual analysis of Indonesian literary texts and their political context, this book investigates how the New Order regime under Suharto was able to build a metanarrative of liberation while purging the Left in Indonesia. Even after the regime's end in 1998, many Indonesians still have an ingrained fear of the prospect of Communism, with the result being that literary representation of the Left is still seen as problematic. Through reviewing Indonesia's institution of literature, the use and abuse of universal humanism under the New Order regime is examined, and the ways in which power intersects with literature is explored. An informative read for scholars and students of Indonesian politics, literature, and the cultural cold war.

This book looks at culturally significant, English-language texts produced in Singapore in the last 20 years by writers such as Balli Kaur Jaswal, Alfian Sa'at, Claire Tham, Amanda Lee Koe, Ng Yi-Sheng and Kevin Kwan. It provides an analysis sensitive to the writers'socio-political and cultural contexts, and shows how Singapore's Anglophone literature successfully disrupts the government's narrative on transforming the island into a global city. By asking difficult questions, challenging hegemonic perspectives and exploring alternatives, the writers interrogate the country's colonial history, its post-colonial Cold War development, and the normalization of totalizing narratives. Their texts also grapple with key aspects of contemporary Singapore society: its official multiracialism, forms of inequality, distribution of privilege, and gender and sexual politics. By connecting these texts to developments in postcolonial literary criticism, cosmopolitanism and globalization studies, thisbook sheds light on the ideological and cultural forces at work in Singapore society today.

Bao Ninh's Contribution to Vietnamese and World Literature analyzes and presents the works of Bao Ninh, the most well-known writer in modern Vietnamese literature. His works are renowned both in Vietnam and worldwide and his novel The Sorrow of War, which has been translated into more than 15 languages, is considered to be one of the classic works of war literature.This book by two award-winning scholars, one in war literature and the other in war history, presents for the first time an overall assessment of Bao Ninh's works, notably of his celebrated novel and his short stories. It outlines his life, setting it in the context of war-torn Vietnam whence he was a teenage soldier at the age of 17 in the North Vietnamese People's Army (NVPA); highlights the main themes of the corpus of his writings, inter alia of suffering and trauma of war impacts of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of veterans, of the futility of war; discusses his approach to writing; compares his writings with others in war literature; and examines and assesses his especial place in world literature. This pioneering monograph of the scholarly evaluation of Bao Ninh himself and his works further engages in the discourse of his contribution to modern Vietnamese literature and world literature. Encouraging a better understanding of wars and conflicts, the book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of modern Asian history, in particular the Vietnam War, Southeast Asian Studies, and Vietnamese and World literature.

This book investigates the ways in which the family unit is now perceived in South and Southeast Asia and the Asian diaspora: its numerous conceptions and the changes it has undergone over the last century and into the new one. The prevailing threads that run through a significant part of the literature and cinema emerging from these societies are the challenges that confront those negotiating changing forms of family, changes which are expressed historically, politically, and socio-culturally, and often in relation to gender, ethnic, or economic imbalances. Though regional and localized in many ways, they are also very much universal in the questions they ask, the lessons they teach, and the connections they make. Theoretically, and in terms of focus, the collection offers a broad range, embracing representation and analysis from scholars across the globe and across disciplines. It assembles written and visual texts from and about India, Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, and the Asian diaspora. How have more fluid concepts of family in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries affected the understanding of family in Asia? How have families in Asia resisted or embraced change? How have they responded to trauma? What do other readings—gendered, feminist, queer, and diasporic—bring to modern debates surrounding family? To what extent are notions of family, community, society, and nation represented as interchangeable concepts in Asian societies? This book questions the power dynamics, ethical considerations, and moral imperatives that underpin families and societies within, and beyond, Asian borders.

The book explores how Chinese TV series and Asian Diaspora fiction are consumed, experienced, and adapted by and for audiences worldwide, particularly those of the Chinese diaspora.It focuses or ‘zooms in'on well-known exceptional Chinese TV series such as Reset and The Bad Kids and ‘zooms-out'to explore a wider panorama of lesser-known TV dramas and films. It also explores Asian American representations of ‘bespoke immigrants', the Nobelist Kazuo Ishiguro and other ‘1.5-generation novelists', a Canadian missionary's memoir, a Taiwanese Canadian young adult fantasy author, among others. Through the analysis of this material, it reveals how some Asian American writers are themselves liable to portraying stereotypes of Asian immigrant communities, reinforcing familiar tropes of the white gaze. It also features an insightful analysis of Taiwan's films and culture, highlighting how Taiwanese identity is represented and moreover shaped by cross-strait tensions.Exploring a diversity of content and media consumption, this book will appeal to students and scholars of media studies, Cultural studies, Chinese studies and Asian studies.

This book includes the history of Chinese literature before 1949. It firstly outlines the development process of Chinese literature and basic features and then discusses them according to the literary genre, for the literature of each era. This book gathers established scholars in the field and presents their latest research in the Chinese literature history studies. Moreover, it has included the literature history of different nationalities in the history of China and the records of folk literature history, reflecting literature from different classes. In the limited space of this book, the writers who have been loved by the Chinese people for three thousand years are discussed, such as Qu Yuan, Tao Yuanming, Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Shi, Xin Qiji, Yuan Haowen, Nalan Xingde, and so on. Careful elaborations are made on each writer together with quotations and analysis of their work.

Romance Fandom in 21st-century Pakistan offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts.Javaria Farooqui inspects the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers'perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, Romance Fandom in 21st-century Pakistan explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour.

This book offers a key analysis of the changing perceptions of family in East Asian societies and the dynamic metamorphosis of “traditional” family units through the twentieth century and into the new millennium. The book focuses on investigations of the Asian family as it is represented in literature, film, and other visual media emerging from within China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and on contestations of the power hegemonies and moral codes that underpin such representations, while also assessing Western and global influences on the Asian family. Individually and collectively, these essays examine traditions and transformations in the evolving conception of family itself and bring together a range of scholars from within and beyond the region to reflect upon the social and cultural mores represented in these texts, the issues that concern Asian families, and projections for future families in their own societies and in a globalized world. Through the written text and the lens of the camera, what directions has the understanding of family in an Asian context taken in the twenty-first century? How have the multiple platforms of media represented, encouraged, or resisted transitions during this time? Amid broader and mutating referential frameworks and cross-cultural influences, is the traditional concept of the “nuclear family” still relevant in the twenty-first century? This book lends further prominence to the diverse literary and cinematic production within East Asia and the eclectic range of media used to represent these ideas. It will be essential reading for scholars of literature, film studies, and Asian studies, and for those with an interest in the cultural and sociological implications of the changing definitions and parameters of the family unit.

This book provides an in-depth analysis and critical examination of the representation of ethnic, sexual, cultural, and individual identities in selected literary works by contemporary writers from Northeast India.The book explores the complex dynamics of identity construction, sexuality, marginalisation, ethnicity, and belonging in the context of Meghalaya and Northeast India as a whole. The author analyses poetry and prose by Janice Pariat, Anjum Hasan, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih, and other Khasi writers. These works candidly portray the turmoil afflicting contemporary Meghalaya – from insurgency and ethnic tensions to ecological threats and loss of roots as well as reconciliation, integration, and mutual understanding. Using postmodern and postcolonial literary strategies, the book depicts fluid, heterogeneous, and multifaceted notions of identity in Northeast India. An exploration of ethnicity, belonging, and unbelonging in the Northeastern context, this book presents marginalised voices and liminal spaces. It will be of interest to academics focusing on Indian English literature, postcolonial literature, and South Asian Studies.

This book examines how nineteenth-century Bengal witnessed women writers like Krishnabhabini Devi, Prasanyamoyee Devi, Swarnakumari Devi and Abala Bose interrogated social stereotypes. It presents the first translation of travel writings and letters by Abala Bose, and examines an Indian woman's close observation as she toured India in colonial times and Europe, America and Japan at the height of British imperialism. Her travelogues in colonial India and imperial England relate to and interrogate the hegemonic role of Western ideologies and deconstruct stereotypes of women's travelogues, thus contributing to the female consciousness and tradition of women's writings.The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and gender and women's studies.

In over thirty interviews conducted between 1982 and 2022, Conversations with Orhan Pamuk reveals a writer of intense literary and political engagement.Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) is a foremost practitioner of the global novel today. His books have been translated into over sixty languages and sold over fifteen million copies globally. The interviews in this volume open windows onto Pamuk's everyday life, craft, and process, constituting an alternative literary history that provides insights into the novelist's influences, method, form, and content. These conversations reveal that a Pamuk novel is predicated on methodical research, at times archival and scholarly, investigative and journalistic, or ethnographic. They are necessarily instructive and edifying as much as they are entertaining, providing a discursive space of literary history where writing, politics, and the everyday intersect and where the politics of literature can be located.

This book unveils the legendary life and the mystic poems of the iconic Chinese Tang poet Han-shan (known by his pen name “Cold Mountain”) and investigates the dissemination and reception of the Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs) attributed to him.Han-shan and the CMPs are amongst the most legendary literary landscapes and cultural memories in the history of world scholarly exchange. The maniac poet recluse hidden in the Cold Mountains, the delicate poetic realms of Confucianism, Buddhism, Zen and Taoism contained in the Cold Mountain Poems, and the incredible pervasiveness of its text travel and canon construction worldwide, as well as the profound impact of CMPs on comparative literature, world literature and Chinese studies, provide the perfect lens to learn about Chinese language, literature, culture and society. This book is thus intended to investigate CMPs in a coherent global context. Considering the vertical studies of the Chinese literature polysystem, it highlights the horizontal influence of CMPs, literarily or non-literarily. Furthermore, it addresses the making and developing of the Han-shan phenomenon and its implications for translation studies, travel writing, canon construction and literary historiography.This book is for scholars, researchers and students in literary history and East Asian Studies focusing on Chinese literature and culture and those interested in the history of poetry in general.

Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century were attracted to realism primarily as a tool for social regeneration. Realism encouraged writers to adopt the stance of the independent cultural critic and drew into the compass of serious literature the disenfranchised'others'of Chinese society. As historical pressures forced new ideological commitments in the late twenties and thirties, however, writers grew suspicious both of the'individualism'implicit in the realist model and of the often superficial nature of the sympathies that their fiction evoked in the middle class. Anderson argues that realism must be defined negatively as a'discourse of limitations'and is of minimal utility in the Chinese search for political and cultural empowerment. He shows how hesitations about the realist model affect the fiction of four representative authors, Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, Mao Dun, and Zhang Tianyi. He also considers the demise of critical realism in the face of a new collectivist understanding of Chinese reality. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

This volume brings together emerging approaches and addresses shifting paradigms in Chinese science fiction studies, offering a window on fan cultures, internet fiction, gender, eco-criticism, post-humanism and biomedical discourse. These studies present a “second wave” of Chinese sf studies, re-evaluating the canon of Chinese sf print and cinematic production, and expand the range of critical approaches to the subject. The structure of the volume is both chronological and theme-focused. These studies also demonstrate that Chinese science fiction represents a significant contribution to modern Chinese cultural production, both in terms of its value, speaking powerfully to our modern condition, and its sheer volume in terms of production and consumption. Chinese science fiction speaks to both China's rapidly shifting reality, its political multiplicity and its formless future, voicing the anticipations and anxieties of a new epoch filled with accelerating alterations and increasing uncertainty.

With multidisciplinary examination, this book explores Waiting for Visa, Ambedkar's autobiographical writing. This investigation ranges from Dalit Studies to Discourse analysis. It aims to provide the reader with in-depth knowledge of Ambedkar's unexplored autobiographical memoir and supplement a range of generalized works. The issues addressed in this book are essential to Ethnic and Race studies in general, to which Dalit Studies is but one contributing discipline. The Dalit Studies already have many texts. These texts are primarily concerned with Dalit identity politics, socio-mythological explorations, and Ambedkarian thoughts on economics, politics, and racial-religious discriminations. These are not discussed with Ambedkar's life stories narrated by himself. This book bridges the gap between Dalit Studies and Ambedkar Studies to project how Ambedkar attempted to forge into an impregnable South Asian social, educational, and political fabric. This reference book aims to attractacademics and students of Asian, South Asian, and Dalit Studies. The book appeals to educators, policymakers, and comparative literary scholars.

This book explores the material and cultural history of the Ming Dynasty based on the Chinese magnum opus Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan (literally, The Story of a Marital Fate to Awaken the World), written under the pseudonym of the seventeenth-century writer Xizhou Sheng.The novel weaves into its narrative, through the characters'personalities and the events it illustrates, important details of Ming material life. Through the literary snapshot of the Ming material culture as reflected in Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan, this work investigates the practices and customs of clothing, food, and travel, three of the'four major concerns of the people's livelihoods,'known as yishizhuxing in Chinese. While frequenting economic dimensions and probing the impact that Ming politics had on the ethos and social economy of the period, it sheds significant light on folk customs, legal and religious practices, and the status of women, among other issues.This work aims to enrich the current Western scholarship, done primarily by Timothy Brook, Craig Clunas, and Glen Dudbridge, on Ming material culture. The book will be of great value to students and scholars of East Asian Studies, Chinese literature, and those interested in the history of material culture in general.

In der neueren Debatte um das Wechselverhältnis von Religion und Politik hat Japan bislang keine Rolle gespielt; zu Unrecht, wie der vorliegende Band zeigt. Japan dürfte das einzige Land mit polytheistisch geprägter Kultur sein, das dem Imperialismus erfolgreich Widerstand entgegensetzte. Mit dem Aufstieg zur Kolonialmacht und der Erhebung des Shintoismus zur Staatsreligion stellte es die Denkmuster europäischer Überlegenheit infrage. Die polytheistische Religion sollte in diesem Transformationsprozess die historische Kontinuität des neuen Staates verbürgen. Dabei stimmen die rhetorischen Strategien überraschend genau mit dem Rückgriff der deutschen Romantik auf vermeintliche ‚Ursprünge‘ überein. Religiöse Symbolsprachen sind interpretationsoffen gegenüber politischen Deutungen, auch quer zur Unterscheidung von poly- und monotheistischen Religionen. Dies zeigt der Band in fünf Fallstudien von Germanisten und Japanologen.

Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness is the first complete translation in any Western language of P'ahan chip, the earliest Korean work of sihwa (C. shihua; “remarks on poetry”) and one of the oldest extant Korean sources. The collection was written and compiled by Yi Illo (1152–1220) during the mid-Koryǒ dynasty (918–1392). P'ahan chip features poetry composed in Literary Chinese (the scriptura franca of the premodern East Asian “Sinographic Sphere”) by the author and his friends, which included such literary greats as Im Ch'un (dates unknown) and O Sejae (1133–?). P'ahan chip also contains the work of other writers of diverse backgrounds: Chinese master poets, famous Confucian literati, eminent Buddhist masters, erudite Daoist hermits, Koryŏ kings—as well as long-forgotten lower-level officials, unemployed intellectuals, and rural scholars. The verse compositions are embedded in short narratives by Yi that provide context for the poems. In accordance with the guidelines of the sihwa-genre, these narratives focus primarily on matters relating to poetry while touching on a wide array of subjects such as Korean history and customs; the court and government institutions; official procedures and festivals; Koryǒ foreign-policy and diplomacy; books and the circulation of knowledge; calligraphy and painting; Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist thought; the role of women; and scenic spots and famous buildings. The book opens with an extensive introduction by translator Dennis Wuerthner on Yi Illo and P'ahan chip set against the backdrop of literary and historical developments in Korea and sino-centric East Asia and vital issues relating to Koryŏ politics, society, and culture. Wuerthner's comprehensive, thought-provoking study is followed by a copiously annotated translation of this important Korean classic.

This book introduces the origin and development of Chinese fiction before late Qing dynasty. It covers a broad range of topics in traditional Chinese fiction studies including novels written in classical and vernacular Chinese, structure and narrative of fiction writing, the relationship between fiction and other traditional Chinese literary genres such as legends and proses of the pre-Qin philosophers. This book is a classic introduction to history of Chinese fiction studies since being first published in 1995.

This book presents a systematic elaboration on Chinese literature and its criticism, with special reference to introducing the predominant role of idea-image. The author holds that image takes on a central position in Chinese literature. Chinese literature is composed of idea-images that depict the scenery and express the emotions in perfect harmony, conveyed through literary language, reflecting the unique aesthetic sensibilities and the creative consciousness of Chinese people. It is created by Chinese literati with an emotion-centered soul, who experience nature and society with a mode of comprehension rooted in sensibility, yet not confined to it. Drawing from the traditional Chinese culture and incorporating the creative expression of Chinese literati, the author expounds systematically on Chinese literature's basic features and living spirit which are centered on the idea-image. Furthermore, the author discusses the transitional patterns observed in both highbrow and vernacular Chinese literature. Embracing a modern research perspective, the author not only provides insights into traditional literature but also sheds light on its contemporary relevance. This endeavor unveils the unique values inherent in Chinese literature at a profound level, thereby offering invaluable insights into the essence and spirit of Chinese literary tradition.

This book explores the literary history of the zhiqing, Chinese educated youth, during the liberal 1980s era of the PRC.By incorporating personal experiences, literary representation, shared history, and theory, it argues that attention to bodies'physical/physiological condition, as represented in their fictional works, can reveal their attitudes toward the shifting and anomalous socio-political environments, both at the time of their rustication in Mao Zedong's era and at the time of writing about their experiences in Deng Xiaoping's cities. It highlights the ideological transformation of educated youth writers'malleable fictional bodies, which preserved and encoded their private ambivalence and dynamic compromises with political and literary dilemmas. By studying these'fictional bodies,'this book deciphers the specific significance of labor, hunger, disability, and sexuality, negating the simplification of the fabricated embodiment as only containing and delivering iconoclastic spirit, sincere patriotism, personal struggle, socialist ideological control, and feminine self-consciousness.Exploring the community of Chinese educated youth, of which Xi Jinping was one, this will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Comparative literature, Modern Chinese literature, and Modern Chinese history.

In this ambitious volume, Yunfei Bai delves into the creative adaptations of classical Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan literary texts by four renowned nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors in France and Argentina: Theophile Gautier, Stephane Mallarme, Victor Segalen, and Jorge Luis Borges. Without any knowledge of the source languages, the authors crafted their own French and Spanish retellings based on received translations of these Asian works. Rewriting the Orient not only explores the so far untapped translation-rewriting continuum to trace the pivotal role of Orientalism in the formation of a singular corpus of world literature that goes beyond the Anglophone canon, but also sheds light on a wide range of innovative discursive strategies that readily challenge traditional notions of cultural appropriation.

Citizenship in Dalit and Indigenous Australian Literatures examines the difference in citizenship as experienced by the communities of Dalits in India and Aboriginals in Australia through an analysis of select literature by authors of these marginalised groups. Aligning the voices of two disparate communities, the author creates a transnational dialogue between the subaltern communities of the two countries, India and Australia, through the literature produced by the two communities. The Covid-19 pandemic has made the divide that exists between the performative citizenship rights enjoyed by the Dalits and the aboriginals and the respective dominant communities of their countries more apparent. The author addresses the issue of this disparity between discursive and performative citizenship through a detailed analysis of select Dalit and Australian aboriginal autobiographies, in particular the works by Dalit autobiographers, Baby Kamble and Aravind Malagatti and aboriginal autobiographers Alice Nannup and Gordon Briscoe. The book uses the dominant tropes of the individual autobiographies as a background to unfurl the denial of citizenship, both in the discursive and the performative form, using the parameters of equal citizenship. In doing so, the author also raises important, groundbreaking questions: How is the performativity of citizenship foregrounded by the Dalits and aboriginals in the literary counter-public? How does this foregrounding evoke violent retribution from the dominant sections? And does the continued violation of performative citizenship point to the dysfunctionality of the performative citizenship status accorded to the Dalits and the aboriginals? Questioning the liberal legacy of political, civil and social citizenship, this book will be of interest to researchers studying Dalit and Aboriginal Literature, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies and World Literature, South Asian Studies and researchers dealing with the question of citizenship.

This book presents the concept of Fenggu, one of the most important aesthetic categories of ancient China. As an inspiring aesthetic principle, it once encapsulated the particularities of various types of artistic creation and played an important role in traditional artistic creation and theoretic critique. The present volume aims to systematically elaborate on its etymological origin, connotations and generation, its great role in overcoming the tendency of creative stereotypes, its logical positioning in the ancient aesthetic system and its profound connection with traditional culture, via comprehensive analysis of a rich repository of original materials, in combination with calligraphy, painting, and poetry criticism. The theoretical character of traditional aesthetics has been derived from agglomeration of Fenggu with other several important categories of paradigm significance. Therefore, its investigation can offer insights into the organic rhythm of the development of ancient aesthetic thought and consequently lay a solid foundation for the construction of ancient art history and aesthetic history.