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The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis provides deep insight into a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. The third decade of the twenty-first century is being marked by a polycrisis caused by various world crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts and climate change leading to economic, geopolitical, environmental, health and security crises.Featuring 42 chapters, the collection examines crises through literary texts in relation to the environment, finance, migration and diaspora, war, human rights, values and identity, health, politics, terrorism and technology. It illuminates the many faces of the current permacrisis as well as the multifarious crises of the past and their representation in literatures across ages and cultures—from the Viking wars, Black Death in mediaeval Europe, technology in ancient China and the crisis of power in Elizabethan England to imperial biopower in nineteenth-century India, the genocides in the twentieth century, upsurge of domestic violence during the Covid lockdown in Spain and the development of AI.The Companion connects diverse cultures, disciplines and academic traditions to show how and why literature, media and art can voice all types of crises across times. It will be a key resource for students and researchers in a broad range of areas including literature, film studies, narrative studies, cultural studies, international politics and ecocriticism.Chapters: Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Through meticulous textual and contextual analysis of the sixteenth-century Chinese tale The Seven Brothers and its fifteen contemporary variants, Juwen Zhang unveils the ways in which the translation and illustration of folk and fairy tales can perpetuate racist stereotypes. By critically examining the conscious and unconscious ideological biases harbored by translators, adapters, and illustrators, the author calls for a paradigm shift in translation practices grounded in decolonization and anti-racism to ensure respectful and inclusive representation of diverse cultures. Translating, Interpreting, and Decolonizing Chinese Fairy Tales not only offers insights for translators, researchers, and educators seeking to leverage folktales and picture books for effective children's education and entertainment, but also challenges our preconceived notions of translated and adapted folk and fairy tales.

This volume brings together an international team of prominent scholars from a range of disciplines, with the aim of investigating the many facets of the Chinese Communist Party's 100-year trajectory. It combines a level of historical depth mostly found in single-authored monographs with the thematic and disciplinary breadth of an edited volume. This work stands out for its long-term and multiscale approach, offering complex and nuanced insights, eschewing any Party grand narrative, and unravelling underlying trends and logics, composed of adaption but also contradictions, resistance and sometimes setbacks, that may be overlooked when focusing on the short term.Rather than putting forward an overall argument about the nature of the Party, the many perspectives presented in this volume highlight the complex internal dynamics of the Party, the diversity of its roles in relation to the state, as well as in its interaction with society beyond the state. Our historical approach stresses impermanence beyond the apparent permanence of the Party's organisation and ideology while also bringing to light the recycling of past practices and strategies. Looking at the Party's evolution over time shows how its founding structures and objectives have had a long-lasting impact as well as how they have been tweaked and rearranged to adapt to the new economic and social environment the Party contributed to creating.

Dans les années 1980, la Chine, sortie d'une série de bouleversements sociaux, a connu une « fièvre culturelle » (wenhua re), marquée par l'obsession de l'intelligentsia pour les théories occidentales. Sigmund Freud figure parmi les noms des penseurs occidentaux provoquant une passion impressionnante à l'époque. Le fait de connaître Freud représentait carrément la ligne de démarcation pour distinguer les élites des masses. Ce phénomène singulier est nommé « vague freudienne ». Elle touche, comme dans d'autres pays et régions, quasiment tous les domaines des sciences humaines, notamment la littérature. Quels fruits ce « mariage métis » entre la psychanalyse et la littérature chinioise a-t-il donné? Dans quelle mesure les idées de Freud ont-elles modifié le paysage de la littérature chinoise?

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.

In 1989, the Hong Kong cult classic writer Xi Xi was diagnosed with breast cancer and began writing in order to make sense of her diagnosis and treatment. Mourning a Breast, published two and a half years later, is a disarmingly honest and deeply personal account of the author's experience of a mastectomy and of her subsequent recovery. The book opens with her gently rolling up a swimsuit. A beginning swimmer, she loves going to the pool, eavesdropping on conversations in the changing room, shopping for swimsuits. As this routine pleasure is revoked, the small loss stands in for the greater one. But Xi Xi's mourning begins to take shape as a form of activism. In a conversational, even humorous, manner, she describes her previous blinkered life of the mind before she came into her body and learned its language. Addressing her reader as frankly and unashamedly as an old friend, she coaxes and confesses, confronts society's failings, and advocates for a universal literacy of the body. Mourning a Breast was heralded as the first Chinese-language book to cast off the stigma of writing about illness and to expose the myths associated with breast cancer. A radical and generous book about creating in the midst of mourning. ‘Using language that was deceptively simple, almost childlike, Xi Xi infused her fiction and poetry with eclectic references to literature, cinema, art, architecture and fairy tales…Her work captured the unease of Hong Kong's transition to Chinese rule, gave voice to the city's children and working-class residents, and helped put it on the literary map.'— New York Times

By Xi Xi, part of the first generation of writers raised in Hong Kong, a wise and amiably written book of autobiographical fiction on the author's experience with breast cancer—from diagnosis to treatment to recovery—and her passage from a life lived through the mind into a life lived through the body.In 1989, the acclaimed Hong Kong writer Xi Xi was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her semi-autobiographical novel Mourning a Breast is a disarmingly honest and inventive account of the author's experience of a mastectomy and of her subsequent recovery. The book opens with her putting away a bathing suit. As the routine pleasure of swimming is revoked, the small loss stands in for the greater one. But Xi Xi's mourning begins to take shape as a form of activism. Addressing her reader as frankly and unashamedly as an old friend, she describes what she is going through; finds consolation in art, literature, and cinema; and advocates for a universal literacy of the body. Mourning a Breast was heralded as one of the first Chinese-language books to cast off the stigma of writing about illness and to expose the myths associated with breast cancer. It is a radical novel about creating in the midst of mourning.

This book gathers outstanding papers presented at the 16th Annual Conference of China Electrotechnical Society, organized by China Electrotechnical Society (CES), held in Nanchang, China, from September 15 to 17, 2023. It covers topics such as electrical technology, power systems, electromagnetic emission technology, and electrical equipment. It introduces the innovative solutions that combine ideas from multiple disciplines. The book is very much helpful and useful for the researchers, engineers, practitioners, research students, and interested readers.

“A sumptuous and lively collection, leaping from story to story in much the same way a fox does — surprisingly, gracefully, and with impressive aim. I loved this book.” – Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Get in Trouble and The Book of Love“What I love most about Ninetails is its fierce allegiance to underdogs of all kinds, its careful and myriad empathy for its characters, but also its pure and artisanal delight in language and fictive possibilities.” —Ocean Vuong, New York Times-bestselling author of On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous and Time is a MotherA “lyrical and virtuosic” fabulist debut collection of stories re-imagining the nine-tailed fox spirit of Asian folklore (Gina Chung).A fox spirit avenges a teen girl by seducing her abuser. A shapeshifting woman finds herself chased through the woods by fox hunters; meanwhile, an assassination plot called Operation Fox Hunt unfolds against the last Queen of Korea. Chinese migrants hoping to make new lives as “paper children” in America find their pasts—and their hopes for the future—embodied in the foxes that haunt the harbor in 1900s Angel Island. In the nine tales of Ninetails, acclaimed poet Sally Wen Mao reimagines the fox spirit from Asian folklore—a shapeshifter, shaman, and seductress—as an icon of vengeance, solidarity and liberation. The characters of her stories are varied—from silicone sex dolls who come to life with new purpose, to women whose crushes manifest as stones—but they all reach for a common purpose: to find truth and belonging in a difficult world determined to consider them alien.With the fabulist vibrancy of Carmen Maria Machado, the sinuous world-building of Helen Oyeyemi, and the sensuous feminist rage of Han Kang, Ninetails is both timeless—unearthing a cultural icon whose origins date back over a thousand years—and timely in its contemporary political urgency.

Politics and paradigm shifts underlying contemporary retellings of fantastic traditional Chinese tales. Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Author Cathy Yue Wang examines the processes by which modern authors and filmmakers reshape these traditional tales to develop new narratives that interrogate the ingrained patriarchal paradigm. Through a rigorous analysis, Wang delineates changes in both content and narrative that allow contemporary interpretations to reimagine the gender politics and contexts of the tales retold. With a broad transmedia approach and a nuanced understanding of intertextuality, this work contributes to the ongoing negotiation in academic and popular discourse between past and present, traditional and contemporary, and text and reality in a globalized and postmodern world. Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughtersoffers an engaging interdisciplinary investigation of issues at the heart of these traditional tales such as gender and status hierarchy, marriage and family life, and in-group/out-group distinction. Beyond the content of these individual stories, Wang ties these narratives together across time using cognitive literary criticism, especially affective narratology, to shed new light on the adaptation of literary and cultural texts and their sociopolitical contexts.

This is an English translation of three plays by Yang Zi—a Yuan dynasty playwright, court official, and ocean-shipping tycoon—with extensive annotations of the Chinese originals. The author conveys the way a Yuan zaju play was composed, especially in the use of its extrametrical characters. To help readers understand the unique position Yang Zi was in during the Yuan dynasty under the Mongol rule, the author also includes a detailed description of Yang Zi's life and his family as an appendix. With a general introduction about the plays and their theatrical features, together with an individual introduction to each play to provide its background, artistic features and also controversies, this anthology is not only a useful collection of Chinese dramas for Western readers interested in learning about the unique way Yuan zaju plays are presented, but also a window through which readers can perceive indirectly the complicated mental activities of a Han intellectual serving the Mongol court.

The first complete Czech translation of one of the most important texts exploring the philosophy of Confucianism. The book Mencius, together with Confucius'Analects, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, constitute the Four Books, for many centuries a syllabus for Chinese civil service examinations. The book contains dialogues by the Master Meng or Mencius (372-289 BC) with various persons, including his disciples and rulers of the Warring States period. As a “wandering scholar”, Mencius tried to persuade them to choose the Way of ancient sage-kings in accordance with Confucian principles of humanity and righteousness. Mencius deals with various topics, including just government, proper governance, and human nature, but also comments on a few non-Confucian teachings, which he tries to eradicate with forceful arguments. The translation from Classical Chinese is accompanied by a brief introduction, bibliography and notes, which make it easier for readers who are not Sinologists to find their way into the text.