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This book examines how social networks contribute to a sense of well-being and a positive self-identity among older Americans and Taiwanese. Although social network analysis has grown increasingly important in the last several decades, few comparisons are available with Chinese and American samples; this is the first research project that compares a Western and an Asian culture using social network types. This research is also the first ever to use social network types to test hypotheses about values, reciprocity, social capital, and the health status of older adults. The data, gathered through systematic sampling in northeastern Oregon and central Taiwan, are first analyzed for the content of exchanges with network members. Then, the structure of the social network is determined by cluster analysis from which four network types are derived. This innovative, two-part procedure reveals a deeper understanding of the role social networks play in the quality of life among elderly in these two cultures. By comparing two very different cultures, the research reveals important details about the relative impact of broader social changes and social networks on the well-being of older adults. The two societies represent contrasting cultural sensibilities regarding the position and treatment of the aged. Yet, social changes in both countries have had a similar impact on older adults in some respects, but not in others. The data allow a determination of whether the inherent dissimilarities between a Western and an Asian culture, or the differences in the structure of each network type, can best account for the variation in exchange modalities and outcomes related to well-being and self-identity. A final chapter highlights possible future research in light of the theoretical and methodological implications of the findings. This book is a valuable resource for those in cultural anthropology, comparative sociology, gerontology, and Asian studies.

For many people, life in post-World War I England was materially and socially harsh, arguably worse than it had been before 1914. Declining agricultural wages led to a depopulation of the countryside and a drift towards towns and cities in search of work, but the industrial foundations upon which the might of the Victorian empire had been built were far from stable. As the effects of a global depression permeated every aspect of the nation s economic life, the social costs of industrialisation, so often written off as the necessary cost of progress, became impossible to ignore. Rarely can this awkward relationship between the England of the history books and the England of the economic slump have been illustrated more effectively than in the 1936 Jarrow Crusade a march to London from the town of Jarrow in the North-East, where the unemployment rate reached 40% in the mid-1930s after the closure of the shipyards. Slowly, but with grim resolution, the ranks of unemployed men, sometimes accompanied by relatives and supporters, wove their way down the spine of England towards the capital, where they hoped to petition the government for a package of economic recovery that would breathe life back into their shattered community. For the writers and artists of the period this tension offered rich material for study, and we find in works from this period discussions of the role of the community, the relationship between the individual and the group, the importance of domestic and public space, and the sense of connection (or the lack of it) between the people and the landscape, both natural and man-made. This book is concerned with the period in which the discussion of English identity assumed such importance because it could not be assumed that the nation itself would survive. It is a period in which the problems that had become apparent in the nation s social, economic, and material fabric in the turbulent 1930s, when speaking of there being at least two Englands was something of a commonplace for many observers, were thrown into sharp relief by the prospect of utter destruction at the hands of Hitler s forces. In such a fraught atmosphere, questions of what the nation was, of what was worth preserving and of what, if an opportunity were to be granted, would have to be changed in the future became both urgent and vital. These questions were raised and discussed in many forums and the responses were often varied and rarely bore a true resemblance to the postwar nation that finally emerged; indeed the prevailing mood of postwar writing may be seen as a sense of disillusionment with what rapidly came to look like the lost opportunities of the postwar settlement. The debate over the country s identity, structure, and future direction, however, was certainly real, and many of the issues it stimulated are very much a part of the ongoing discussion of England s identity today. As such, this book is a valuable addition to collections in literature and history.

This book is in the Cambria Australian Literature book series (Series editor: Susan Lever).Shirley Hazzard is one of Australia s most significant expatriate authors, and a major international literary figure by any measure. Her work has been extensively and extravagantly praised by writers and reviewers, such as Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Ford: If there has to be one best writer working in English today it s Shirley Hazzard. Similarly, novelist Michael Cunningham: One of the greatest writers working in English today, and London Times critic Brian Appleyard For me, the greatest living writer on goodness and love .Shirley Hazzard has lived in New York and Capri since 1951. Internationally, she is one of the great writers of movement, passage, transposition and transit. Her novels trace the fate of a series of young expatriate female protagonists in the geographical and emotional vistas opening up after World War II, but before the social upheavals of feminism. They take her readers into moral territory that is at once utterly sure and breached at every turn, with the certainties of romance forms tested by human vulnerability and the often brutal social and political canvas of modern life.She has published four novels: The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003); two collections of stories: Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967); two monographs on the United Nations: Defeat of An Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations (1973) and Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990); a memoir of her friend Graham Greene: Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000); and, most recently, a collection of her own and her late husband Francis Steegmuller s occasional writings on Naples: The Ancient Shore: Dispatches From Naples (2008). All her fiction has remained continuously in print since its first publication.She has received major literary awards including the 2003 US National Book Award, the 2004 Miles Franklin Award, the 2005 William Dean Howells Medal for best American novel, the 1981 US National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, the 1977 O. Henry Short Story Award; and has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the ( Lost ) Man Booker prize. She is a Fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.Despite the critical acclaim for Hazzard s work, there has not yet been a full critical study, and only a handful of scholarly articles have been published since the early 1990s. This scholarly neglect is in part a consequence of Hazzard s complicated location outside the limits of national literary canons.In particular, Hazzard s highly significant writing about the United Nations has never before been considered by critics, and it is not widely known today that she was the first writer to publish an account of the US State Department McCarthyist involvement in UN hiring of staff from its earliest years, and the first person to air claims that UN Secretary-general Kurt Waldheim had concealed details of his World War II activities. This public writing stands in a fascinating relation to her highly wrought literary fiction, presenting particular challenges to her critics and readers.This study brings together Hazzard s highly regarded literary fiction and her impassioned, polemical critiques of the United Nations through the rubrics of her humanist thought and her deep commitment to internationalist, cosmopolitan principles. Chapter 1 provides the first critical analysis of Hazzard s public writings, paying particular attention to their rhetorical and poetic structures and their moral appeals. Olubas then works through each of Hazzard s published works of fiction in turn.In chapter 2, she analyses the two collections of short stories through their shared concern with the question of institutions bureaucracy and marriage in modern life. Chapter 3 turns to Hazzard s two early novels, both set in Italy, and examines the appeal made in each to Romantic poetry, and to the ways narrative, desire and death play out across the stories of love. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to Hazzard s two great novels, The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, respectively. The Transit of Venus is analysed as a melodrama, with particular focus on its complex narrative manipulation of concealment and revelation, and the ethical drive of its central love story. The final chapter focuses on the interplay of love and war in The Great Fire, and argues that this novel returns Hazzard s readers to her own journey, her departure from Australia at the pivotal points of post-war Asia: colonial Hong Kong and post-nuclear Hiroshima.Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist is an important book for all literature, Australian literature, women writers and contemporary fiction collections.

The Chinese legal profession was revived in 1979 after the purges of the Cultural Revolution. In the thirty years since that revival, hundreds of law schools have been established, the bar has undergone exponential growth, and the legal economy has flourished. Indicia of progress abound, but signs of profound challenge remain. Western academia and media have given scant attention to these developments. To the extent that Western commentators pay any notice whatsoever, it is to human rights lawyers and challenges to the rule of the Communist party. But such a focus misses the larger picture. The most consequential developments in Chinese legality are occurring at the center, rather than the periphery, of what is considered politically acceptable. Where building the rule of law in China is concerned, the reliable enforcement of extant rights in contract, property, and tort is far more important than pushing for the recognition of new rights or changing the process whereby rights are created. At the heart of this process is China s growing legal profession. Their unique historical situation, their distinctive sociology, their competence, and the conditions of their practice, as well as several other factors, are indispensable components to understanding the growth of Chinese legality and the socialist rule of law. Justice Holmes wrote that the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race. This adage speaks to the intimate relationship between law and the structure, order, and values of a society. There is a growing interest in the structure, order, and values of China. This is all too reasonable given that one-fifth of the human population is in China, the Chinese economy is surging along to preeminence, and the Chinese state exerts an evergrowing influence on other states and international bodies. All recent trends underscore the fact that indifference to the Chinese system is a luxury that nobody can afford. Examining Chinese lawyers the people whose lives and purpose lay at the very heart of these currents provides an incomparable understanding of what China is today and may be in the future. Life in modern China is riddled with frustrations. Much has been written about the experience of such frustrations, from defective products to intellectual property piracy, but very little has been written about the underlying cause. The silence is broken by Lawyers in Modern China, which explains these frustrations as a natural result of the underdevelopment of the Chinese legal profession. As the Chinese state has slimmed down over the last thirty years, its ability to enforce laws and provide oversight in the lives and undertakings of the Chinese people has been diminished. The legal profession has not grown enough in size or strength to offset this loss. As a result, much of life in modern China takes place under conditions of low-level anarchy. The book explores several factors that contribute to the current state of underdevelopment of the legal profession, including weak demand for legal services, the balkanization of the profession, systemic sources of corruption, and a dearth of comprehensive yet affordable legal research tools. Finally, the book offers a set of tailored policy recommendations that are designed to ameliorate the problems that stifle the Chinese bar and cultivate it into a powerful force for the promotion of the rule of law. Lawyers in Modern China represents a contribution to multiple areas of scholarship, including the sociology of lawyers, law and economics, sinology, Chinese history, and political science. The foreword is by eminent international law professor, Dr. Tom Ginsburg, from the University of Chicago.

The ravages of the First World War ensured that the deeply cherished Enlightenment ideals of reason, individualism, and intellectual supremacy finally crumbled and dissolved. As the Dadaists and Surrealists demonstrated in overtly defiant avant-garde postures and various public spectacles, the essential purposelessness and futility of such unprecedented carnage and bloodshed had finally shattered all intellectual illusions ever pertaining to human meaning and logic. The steady stream of political developments which led to the onset of war were equally incidental and senseless, while incessant killings between deadlocked armies exposed the equal guilt and reprehensibility of all warring parties. Numerous artists many of whom perished during the war found themselves involved in the bloody battles, and their chilling accounts the cultural canons of poems, novels, essays, paintings, and diaries on the horrors of this war are all dominated by genocidal images of mass human slaughter, inhumane massacre, unspeakable atrocities, and the profound despair that arises from utter senselessness. The Second World War, however, was not simply a repeat of the First World War in terms of its devastating effects, its atrocities, massacres, and widespread carnage. The Nazi era manifested a completely different reality, an unprecedented phenomenon with new and unfamiliar cultural implications. The carnage was not senseless , for it was highly rationalized and systematised; bloodshed was motivated by fierce ideological convictions. Many of these ideologies were nourished and inspired by the ideas of Nietzsche concerning the imposition of a super regime , able to rise above the restrictive morality of ordinary men. While it is impossible to create a clear division between categories of right and wrong, evil and good, throughout the career of the Third Reich, the ambiguities and perceptions of equal guilt and equal reprehensibility that overshadowed the previous world war were largely absent from the second. Highly masterminded and systematised evil forces were responsible for the bloodshed which took place, for in full operation was a rationalised, strategic regime which meticulously orchestrated, calculated, and supervised a systematic process of ethnic cleansing. The rationale of the concentration camp universe indicates not merely the decline and dissolution of reason in the face of absolute evil, but something other than this, something much deeper. This war was to do with presence rather than absence . It was a war of extreme, conceived purpose involving the presence of a new collective political force and new methods: lebensraum , autarky, world domination. This book seeks to establish a new way of examining not only history but contemporary manners of historical representation on film, as well as their cultural and philosophical implications. It aims to advance new ways of investigating the past with films that are, on the surface, only tangentially related to traditional manners of historical representation. The work forwards two unconventional movies Docteur Petiot and Delicatessen as objects of historical film-making. The reasoning for this departure from convention, that the Holocaust itself requires a peripheral, even postmodern approach to not only its representation but that of the past in general. On a more specific level, France during the 1990s experienced a heightened period of political debate regarding its collaboration during the Vichy period. Various contemporary films focussed on national complicity and crisis of identity engaging with that which Henry Rousso defines as the miroir bris the shattering of illusions. The two films studied may be viewed as discourses that portray this crisis both in terms of content (the public shattering of movie screens or the sudden inundation of an apartment block) but through generic diversity and departure from traditional modes of representation.

Across time and place, pregnancy and childbirth rank among the most transformative physical and psychological events in women s lives. Women s childbearing experiences depend not only on their own biology and psyche but also on the nature and quality of care they receive. The nature of the prevailing obstetric care model in the early 21st-century United States has been described as high-tech, low touch, highlighting its emphasis on using medical technology, as opposed to non-technological care and support, to control unproblematic physical processes on the argument that this approach improves maternal safety and comfort. However, it should be noted that reasonably reliable national data fail to show significant maternal or newborn health gains corresponding to recent, dramatic rises in hospital obstetric procedures such as labor induction, labor acceleration, and cesarean delivery. In this context where medical intervention, necessary or not, assumes an increasingly central role in the childbearing equation, questions of what mothers expect to happen in labor and delivery and how their subsequent birth experiences meet those expectations become paramount. Global numeric indicators cannot capture the quality of women s reactions to childbirth itself, particularly as maternal care shifts in response to consumer interests it presupposes, offering options for comfort, care, and even the possibility of foregoing the labor process altogether. This work reflects the critical need to document early 21st-century U.S. mothers own words on what they expected to happen in childbirth and later, how labor and delivery went and how it met their expectations. Among this book s most important contributions is its inclusion of extensive interview material drawn from 75 diverse women who spoke freely on their childbirth expectations and subsequent experiences. By itself, the interview material lends an important, though at times unsettling, insider perspective on how labor and delivery can unfold. The narratives also provide a maternal view on how those charged with their care respond during this physically and emotionally demanding transition. In addition, the book provides a timely analysis of scientific data on contemporary maternal care procedures, making plain why so many refer to 21st-century mainstream obstetric care as technocratic. The scientific data serve as an excellent backdrop for more extensive coverage of the maternal interviews, organized around the distinctions mothers made related to the childbirth pathway on which they anticipated traveling such as natural childbirth in a hospital, planned cesarean delivery, or planned vaginal birth after cesarean. The pathways are in turn discussed in terms of their relationship to an underlying technocratic, humanistic, or holistic maternal care philosophy. Historically, it has been assumed that maternal biological forces are the primary drivers of what ultimately becomes a woman s childbirth experience. However, this book s unique approach to explaining birth experiences as a function of an anticipated childbirth pathway with a distinct, underlying care philosophy indicates that biological forces only partly explain how and why maternal expectations of childbirth may align with or stray far from what they originally anticipated. A final integrative chapter offers critical commentary and recommendations tied to what, from women s perspective, they believed they could really expect compared to the reality of childbirth in the early 21st century United States. The book is targeted towards an academic readership, including scholars and medical professionals with interest in women s health, women s and maternal mental health, women s reproductive health, reproductive technology, medical humanities, medical anthropology, narrative studies, pregnancy, and childbirth.

Although there is a significant literature on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, there are few analyses that address the deconstructive critique of phenomenology as it simultaneously plays across range of cultural productions including literature, painting, cinema, new media, and the structure of the university. Using the critical figures of ghost and shadow and initiating a vocabulary of phantomenology this book traces the implications of Derridean spectrality on the understanding of contemporary thought, culture, and experience. This study examines the interconnections of philosophy, art in its many forms, and the hauntology of Jacques Derrida. Exposure is explored primarily as exposure to the elemental weather (with culture serving as a lean-to); exposure in a photographic sense; being over-exposed to light; exposure to the certitude of death; and being exposed to all the possibilities of the world. Exposure, in sum, is a kind of necessary, dangerous, and affirmative openness. The book weaves together three threads in order to format an image of the contemporary exposure: 1) a critique of the philosophy of appearances, with phenomenology and its vexed relationship to idealism as the primary representative of this enterprise; 2) an analysis of cultural formations literature, cinema, painting, the university, new media that highlights the enigmatic necessity for learning to read a spectrality that, since the two cannot be separated, is both hauntological and historical; and 3) a questioning of the role of art as semblance, reflection, and remains that occurs within and alongside the space of philosophy and of the all the posts- in which people find themselves. Art is understood fundamentally as a spectral aesthetics, as a site that projects from an exposed place toward an exposed, and therefore open, future, from a workplace that testifies to the blast wind of obliteration, but also in that very testimony gives a place for ghosts to gather, to speak with each other and with humankind. Art, which installs itself in the very heart of the ancient dream of philosophy as its necessary companion, ensures that each phenomenon is always a phantasm and thus we can be assured that the apparitions will continue to speak in what Michel Serres s has called the grotto of miracles. This book, then, enacts the slowness of a reading of spectrality that unfolds in the chiaroscuro of truth and illusion, philosophy and art, light and darkness. Scholars, students, and professional associations in philosophy (especially of the work of Derrida, Husserl, Heidegger, and Kant), literature, painting, cinema, new media, psychoanalysis, modernity, theories of the university, and interdisciplinary studies.

This book is the first comprehensive examination of the bilingual acquisition of English and Mandarin in a child. It makes a much-needed contribution to the field of child language research, and, in particular, the research on bilingual children. Firmly grounded in bilingual language acquisition theory and methodology, the book uses empirical data to assess the relation between the two languages of a bilingual child growing up in Sydney, Australia. It also addresses a range of theoretical and methodological questions that are central to the study of language acquisition, bilingualism and child development. This book is the first detailed, systematic investigation of the language development of a child exposed to Mandarin and English from birth in an immigrant family in Australia. It is also the first longitudinal study of bilingual acquisition in a context-bound, one-language-one-environment situation. The vast majority of existing research studies one-parent-one-language situations. The focus of the investigation reported in this book is on tracing the developmental route of person identification in the bilingual child in both languages from the age of 19 months to 4 years. Person identification is the precondition to socioemotional attachment and meaningful human social life, an important milestone in a child s cognitive, interpersonal, and language development which has surprisingly long been neglected in bilingual research in spite of its importance. This book addresses both pragmatic and semantic issues relating to pronoun usage in real life communication context, while investigating the child s early word learning and syntactic development in each of the two languages. This addresses, in turn, a key issue in bilingual acquisition research of whether the early lexical and syntactic development is "e;separate"e; or "e;fused"e; in the early stages of development. Additionally, the book explores the nature of the weaker language and bilingual acquisition strategies in relation to input and learning context while the two languages are in contact and interaction and it compares these and other findings with both monolingual and bilingual data. The overall aim of this study is three-fold: first, to improve our understanding of the process of bilingual first language acquisition in its own right; second, to contribute to a better understanding of child language acquisition processes in general; and third, to help bilingual families and educators to understand early language differentiation in bilinguals and manage possible interaction in language contact while maximising bilingual experiences. This book will be an important resource for researchers, developmental psycholinguists, language educators, and clinical professionals from related disciplines. Parents who wish to raise their children to be bilingual will also benefit from this book.

Philip Roth s standing on the literary scene is undisputed. The recipient of innumerable literary awards, the Jewish American author has reached past the precincts of his Newark s Weequahic neighborhood to become one of the most significant American novelists of the late twentieth century, an unrivalled master of the art of fiction. His literary output spanning more than 50 years and more than thirty books has been astounding both in terms of quantity and quality. Roth s place among the classics has been established by a host of critical studies presenting Roth s work from a myriad of thematic perspectives. Critical literature on Roth has become a minor industry of sorts and the interested reader may find a number of excellent general book-length treatments of his oeuvre. Starting with the front matter in The Human Stain (2000), Roth has rearranged the list of his previously published works, grouping them according to the narrating voice. The list of the Zuckerman Books is the most conspicuous in this rearrangement, and the only one that has been signaled by Roth as complete since the publication of Exit Ghost (2007) that has marked the demise of Nathan Zuckerman explicitly. The time appears ripe to narrow the scope of inquiry and engage critically with Roth s own rethinking of his work, starting from the character who has been recognized unanimously as the author s most beloved protagonist and his most recognizable alter-ego figure. This book provides a sustained analysis of the nine Zuckerman Books plus My Life as a Man (1974) and The Facts (1988) featuring Roth s most famous protagonist in ways crucial to assess his literary function across multiple narratives. This book traces Zuckerman s fictional birth in My Life as a Man and The Ghost Writer, his growth through Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy, The Counterlife, The Facts, his development in American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain and his death in Exit Ghost, to explore how Roth has been progressively creating and refining this mask and his voice as a means to come to terms with his own biography, his history, and his own self as a writer. All the defining features of Roth s poetics masking practices, ventriloquism, meta-fictional focus, cultural significance are visible in the creation of Zuckerman as narrator. This study keeps up the ongoing reflection in Roth s scholarly literature on the foundational relationship between facts and fictions demonstrating how Zuckerman amplifies and perfects the typically Rothian tendency to draw materials for his fictional writing from his own life and reveals Roth s ambition to create a monument out of a specific and well individualized identity: the writer steeped in American history. As Roth s most cherished mask, Nathan Zuckerman opens for the reader interested in the Jewish American author a perfect window on the crucial issue of authorship and on the range of Roth s thematic preoccupations. In proposing to view The Ghost Writer as a narrative beginning, The Counterlife as a middle and Exit Ghost as an end, the book addresses the stakes at play in reading across multiple narratives directly: how is Zuckerman s identity shaped? How does narrative technique interact with biographical data? How do readers make (progressive) sense of Zuckerman and how do they cope with inconsistencies? What kind of coherence can be ascribed to Zuckerman in spite of the gaps his long narrative presents? What if anything is specifically Jewish about the creation of Zuckerman as narrator of numerous books? What are the literary functions, the formal and narratological underpinnings and the psychological needs Zuckerman activates and reveals? The book's groundbreaking contribution consists in a unique focus on the inner, that is to say, narratological logic of the fictional world presided over by Nathan Zuckerman and in the contextual attention to how form in its panoply of aspects triggers reader responses and activities. Masiero illuminates Roth s art of fiction through the detailed analysis of Roth s ambitious dream of creating a complete narrative microcosm. This book is important for the general reader interested in contemporary American fiction, as well as for teachers of American literature and Jewish studies, for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, and, of course for Roth scholars and literary theorists.

Fascination with what makes the Germans tick has produced a vast range of texts that explore German postwar politics, culture, and society. Yet within this considerable body of work, there is a paucity of academic analysis that acknowledges the role of media discourse in the representation and construction of German identity. This book makes an important contribution to the study of German national identity by offering a detailed and large-scale academic analysis of how German media discourse between 1998 and 2005 represents German national identity. It brings together a variety of case studies: European integration, citizenship and immigration, sports and consumption. It makes the case for the role of popular culture in the discursive formation of national identity and demonstrates that the nation is constructed against political and non-political subjects. By looking at a variety of topic contexts, this book identifies a master narrative of the German nation. It tells the story of a nation that has its roots firmly in the memory of National Socialism and constructs ethnocentric nationalism as taboo. Yet at the same time it cannot escape the past as it harbors racist images of self and other.

Social conformity surrounds and enmeshes us, but we are seldom aware of its full impact. This book demonstrates just how pervasively social conformity affects society and politics. The impact of conformity on voting behavior and government is a particular focus. When conformity affects voters' choices, it runs contrary to the idea that they are making a rational decision among political parties or candidates the basis of democracy and it can lead to unexpected political consequences. At the extreme, social conformity can hijack democratic government and lead to violence against minority groups or totalitarianism. The impact of conformity is assessed through quantitative and qualitative analyses, a few simple mathematical models, and specific numerical predictions that are verified with historical data from the USA, Germany, Japan, Russia, and many other countries over much of the 20th century. The results give new insights on voting, political party systems, crime, ethnic violence, democratic government, and the nature of society, including both positive and negative consequences of conformity. Building on research in cognitive psychology over the last twenty years, the book also ties conformity and resulting social institutions to certain cognitive processes that go on without a person's conscious awareness.

The effects of the displacement of peoples--their forced migration, their deportation, their voluntary emigration, their movement to new lands where they made themselves masters over others, or became subjects of the masters of their new homes--reverberate down the years and are still felt today. The historical violence of the era of empire and colonies echoes in the literature of the descendants of those forcibly moved and the exiles that those processes have made. The voices of its victims are insistent in the literature that has come to be called post-colonial. Although the term post-colonial is insufficient to capture fully the depth and breadth of those writers that have been labeled by it (for it is itself something of a colonial instrument, ghettoizing writers in English who are still considered to be foreign ), there is a common bond among the works of those novelists who understand the process of exile and see themselves as exiles--both from their homes and from themselves. In this eloquently argued book with meticulous theoretical groundwork, Dr. Cristina Dascalu presents a most lucid and concise examination of exile. In addition to her negotiation of the term exile, what is most original and significant about Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile is the selection of authors. Reaching across national (in terms of country of exile) and ethnic (in terms of region/religion of birth) boundaries, Dr. Dascalu elegantly shows the persistent relevance of the experience and implications of exile to the writing of fiction in the world today. Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul are very distinct authors whose works are not often discussed together in this context. Using Benedict Anderson s notion of unimagined communities, among other critical lenses, she makes significant connections between the way exile functions as a theme and as a condition for their writing. Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile will be a critical addition for all collections in Comparative Literature as well as Ethnic and Immigrant Studies.

Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Border Crossings is a profound study of how contemporary Arab American women writers who have been marginalized and silenced, especially after 9/11, are pointing out the racism, oppression, and marginalization they experience in the United States and are beginning to uncover the particularities of their own ethnic histories. The book focuses mainly on four works by contemporary Arab American women writers: A Border Passage (1999) by Leila Ahmed, Emails from Scheherazad by Mohja Khaf, West of the Jordan (2003) by Laila Halaby, and Crescent (2003) by Diana Abu-Jaber, examining how each of these works uniquely tackles the idea of having a hyphenated identity--an identity that has been complicated by living in a hostile environment and living in a borderzone. In this book, the author articulately examines how Leila Ahmed, Mohja Khaf, Laila Halaby, and Diana Abu Jaber explore what it means to belong to a nation as it wages war in their Arab homelands, supports the elimination of Palestine, and racializes Arab men as terrorists and Arab women as oppressed victims, while investigating the themes of exile, doubleness, split vision, and difference. Using postcolonial and feminist literary theories, the author insightfully investigates how these Arab American women writers critique intellectual tendencies that might be understood as making concessions to Western and Orientalist fundamentalist regimes and movements that in effect abandon Arab women to their iron rule.

This book deconstructs the controversy of globally located Chinese women authors, including Maxine Hong Kingston (America) , Wei Hui (Mainland China), Li Ang (Taiwan), and Li Bihua (Hong Kong). It vividly shows how these authors are trapped in a dilemma between feminism, nationalism, and neocolonialism complicated by the powerful influences of global popular culture. This book not only engages in the much debated major issues such as gender, nation, narration and globalization, but more profoundly, it also points out the cultural and political significance of literary and cultural criticism, a much neglected area of research. The author s detailed examination of Chinese nationalism from the perspectives of gender and globalization shows her sharp awareness of the changing geopolitical mapping of Chineseness. Critics of Chinese literature and culture will benefit from this work in this era of social and political changes.

Taiwan s historical and contemporary status as a nexus of Asian and Western cultural influences provides a rich canvas of research for the author who is uniquely trained in both Western critical and Taiwanese theatrical practices. This highly original book furnishes a creative interpretation of alternative, contemporary Taiwanese Theater by applying Feminism, Interculturalism and other western theories to three intercultural performances of four avant-garde female directors from 1993-2004. Although several important playwrights and directors have staged vital gender critiques of national and international practices, almost no critic has remarked upon them. The book s intersection of a gender critique, and, in part, a postcolonial one, with Taiwanese stage practices is, therefore, a unique and significant contribution.

Is the virtual charter public school a viable alternative to traditional education? Virtual Charter Schools and Home Schooling is a rich and insightful study that undertakes a comprehensive investigation to answer this important question. It strongly makes the case for this idea with one of the first comprehensive investigations of the relationship between virtual charter schools and home schooling. Benefits as well as drawbacks or limitations to both parties are examined using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. This book is a critical addition to collections in Education and Communications.

This study provides heretofore unavailable information to be considered by policy makers when making these difficult decisions. The study reveals that what actually goes on in the classroom and the media center can be quite different from what school administrators think is going on. The voices of students, teachers and librarians may be heard in rich detail as they speak for themselves. This book is a required reference for all involved in education, particularly intellectual freedom.

Online shopping is now a well-entrenched and highly profitable multi-billion dollar industry. Despite this, little is known regarding the characteristics of online shoppers and why some consumers are more prone than others to purchase online. This book proposes and tests a new classification scheme and framework for understanding consumer adoption of the internet as a shopping medium. The work also employs one of the largest national online samples ever utilized in this area of research. The results of this book are highly valuable and have extensive implications. This book is required reading for academic researchers as well as online retailing executives.

This book explores how the homeless are portrayed by the media and, consequently, how public perceptions of the homeless are shaped. By analyzing how the media informally educate their audiences, interviewing homeless people and journalists, and conducting content analysis of news stories, this research uncovers the reality that the issue of homelessness is not a media priority because it does not provide the requisite ratings boost. This study also debunks the myth that the solution to a homeless person s problem is a meal and an overnight stay, illuminating how much farther the distance to becoming a regular person is. This work will stand as one of the most penetrating analyses of homelessness ever conducted in the USA.

Metalworking in Bronze Age China is the first study that adopts a comprehensive, thorough, and interdisciplinary approach toward early Chinese lost-wax castings. It shows that the dominant belief that the lost-wax process as the optimal method for casting bronzes deserves more rigorous examination. In a broader sense, the book provides a study on the norms, which are seldom questioned. By examining the reasons why Chinese founders often chose not to use the lost-wax process they had clearly mastered, the book refutes the idea that lost-wax technology is the only right way to cast bronzes. This study demonstrates that a norm is in many ways an illusion that twists our comprehension of art, technology, civilization, and history.

Wen Yuan-ning (1900 1984) was both an insider and an outsider on the politics of celebrity in modern China. Born into a Hakka family in the Dutch East Indies, he studied law at Cambridge University before moving to China to embark on a remarkably varied career. He taught English literature at China s top universities, including Peking and Tsinghua, contributed to leading English-language periodicals such as The China Critic and T ien Hsia Monthly, served in China s legislature in Nanking, worked as a wartime propagandist in Hong Kong, and eventually was appointed as China s ambassador to Greece. During the heady days of Anglophone publishing in 1930s China, Wen Yuan-ning edited for The China Critic a series of Unedited Biographies (later Intimate Portraits ) of famous contemporary Chinese personages. Wen and his collaborators some of whom wrote anonymously offered readers mischievous and idiosyncratic accounts of the careers and personalities of the people in the news. These celebrity sketches proved both controversial and popular, with several of them immediately being translated into Chinese. A selection of seventeen of Wen s own contributions to The China Critic series was published to acclaim in 1935 as the book Imperfect Understanding. Yet Wen and his contributions to Chinese literary culture disappeared from the historical record after the founding of the People s Republic, likely because Wen wrote in English and had close ties to the Chinese Nationalist Party. What did it mean to be a celebrity in 1930s China? Who were Republican China s preeminent intellectuals, writers, artists, politicians, diplomats, and businesspeople, and how were they represented in the popular press? This anthology brings together fifty rediscovered essays, written in English in 1934, which offer fascinating, close-up profiles of a constellation of celebrities. From the warlord Han Fuju to the Peking Opera star Mei Lanfang to the intellectual leader Hu Shi to the novelist Lao She to ambassador Wellington Koo to the Singaporean Chinese entrepreneur Lim Boon Keng to the deposed Qing Emperor Puyi, the series presents a panorama of Chinese elites. Imperfect Understanding constitutes a significant archival discovery, a unique artifact of the pre-war heyday of Anglophone literary culture in China. Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Chinese Celebrities is both an entertaining work of literature, by turns comedic and touching, and an important historical document. Its sketches represent influential Chinese historical figures, warts and all, in the eyes of contemporary observers seeking to provide readers an alternative to the autobiographical puffery of popular books like Who s Who in China. Christopher Rea s introduction offers new research on the forgotten literary figure Wen Yuan-ning and argues that one of the essays published under his name was written anonymously by a young man who went on to become one of modern China s literary giants: Qian Zhongshu. This edition of Imperfect Understanding also includes multiple reviews of Wen s book, brief biographies of the subjects of the Critic series, and a bibliography of further writings by and on Wen Yuan-ning.

When Gao Xingjian was proclaimed Nobel Laureate of Literature in 2000, it drew attention to his significant body of literary works that included a collection of short stories, titled Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather (1989), two autobiographical novels titled Soul Mountain (1990) and One Man s Bible (1999), as well as seventeen plays, three of which when performed in Beijing in the early 1980s, had turned him into an instant celebrity, not just in China, but internationally. His plays Absolute Signal (1982), Bus Stop (1983), and Wild Man (1986) were well known in the English- speaking world soon after their publication in Chinese. However, when his next play, The Other Shore (1986), was banned after a few rehearsals, he relocated to Paris in 1987. His play Escape (1990) about the 4 June 1989 military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, resulted in a virtual ban on his writings, which could no longer be published, sold, or performed in the People s Republic of China. This meant that both the author and his works had been airbrushed out of existence, and that Gao Xingjian research would find it impossible to take root in China. Gifted with extraordinary artistic sensibilities and boundless curiosity, Gao was born in Republican China in 1940 into a cosmopolitan family environment and established precocious reading habits from an early age. His formal education began after the establishment of the People s Republic of China in 1949, and he subsequently enrolled in a five-year French course at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing (1957 1962), where he read widely on modern and contemporary French authors, European writings in French translation, and also in premodern Chinese writings. Such writings were all banned beyond the walls of the Institute library, and Gao s prolific reading would inform what he began to write in secret for his personal enjoyment, because what he wrote clearly failed to conform with the national guidelines for cultural production. Mao Zedong s experiment in social engineering during the Cultural Revolution (1966 1976) meant the negation of the individual and the extolling of mass ideology. Gao survived by writing in secret to remind himself that he had a conscious thinking self. Years later he distinguished himself in China and the rest of the world for his innovative fiction, plays, theatre, and Chinese ink paintings. Since Gao Xingjian s Nobel win in 2000 he has demonstrated his profound erudition across cultures in his creative explorations in literature and the visual arts. His intense intellectual curiosity can seldom be matched by his contemporaries, and his creative achievements in literature, the dramatic arts, painting, and film have been extraordinary, and have been reflected in his aesthetic treatises on art and literature. English-language publications have been in the forefront of Gao Xingjian research since the 1980s, and this book fills a Gao Xingjian research hiatus simply because it is hard to keep abreast of his stridently innovative creations. This volume brings readers up to date on Gao Xingjian, who is probably in this age of uncertainties, one of the foremost aesthetes in literature and the visual arts. Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics demonstrates the extensive reach of Gao Xingjian s transcultural, transdisciplinary and transmedia explorations. Showcased here is the panoramic aesthetics of a polymath who has successfully personified modern-time renaissance by projecting the struggles of the individual s inner landscape into vivid images on stage, film, black-and-white paintings, and in the multilayered narrative expressions of fiction and poetry, even dance and music, to evoke a sense of sincerity and authenticity that penetrates a viewer/reader s heart. The volume is divided into four parts: philosophical inquiry; transdiscipline, transgenre, transculture; cine-poems with paintings, dance and music; and identifying and defining the self. The chapters probe different aspects of Gao Xingjian s work, bearing testimony to their diverse specializations. This book will appeal to Chinese literature scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with an interest in the broad subjects of contemporary Chinese literature, high arts, avant-garde culture, women s and gender studies, Sinophone film and transmedia culture, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

Lu Xun, a founder of modern Chinese literature, lived through a pivotal moment in Chinese history. Schooled in the old order, he matured during its symbolic collapse the end of the dynastic system and lived through the wrenching transition into a new order that had not yet come into view. The Chinese state, weakened by massive internal rebellions, faced unprecedented military, commercial, and diplomatic pressure from Western powers. Devastating challenges in the material realm brought into question fundamental premises of Chinese identity. Why was China so weak and what could be done about it? Initially inclined to look to the material realm for solutions, Lu Xun early rejected a medical career and staked his future on a conviction that literature offered a promising arena from which to convert minds and hearts to new ways of perceiving, ways that were better adapted to the current crisis. Yet when prompted to write short stories that might forward that agenda, he wrote the stories of Call to Arms and Wandering, which instead gave symbolic expression to the ambiguities and complexities that he experienced within himself. Although he came to doubt the power of literature to contribute to the urgent need for cultural transformation, the stories from these collections comprise an essential part of his legacy. His deep concern about human suffering and his commitment to truth-telling are underlying pre-occupations that run throughout his evolving understanding of this moment in China s history. Lu Xun attributed his motivation for a career in literature to his desire to cure the spirits of the Chinese people. Given Lu Xun s explicit ambition to address China s historical crisis, scholars have addressed in great depth his contributions to Chinese intellectual and literary history and probed his short stories as expressions of his ambition to help solve China s crisis. He has been perceived as both an agent of change and an embodiment of his time. Yet generally scholars have not queried the psychological dimensions of his self-appointed task. If he imagined that curing spirits might even be possible, it would seem that he might have had at least an implicit psychological model of the disease, its causes, a process for healing it, and a vision of the cured state. Did he? Scholars who study Lu Xun s modern short stories have usually focused on the content and used the stories to understand Lu Xun the writer or to sheds light on his times; they have attended to the structure only to the degree that it illuminates these concerns. This study executes a reversal, decentering the content and focusing on the structure as a primary means to understand the texts, and it seeks to understand the Lu Xun who presents himself through his work, not Lu Xun the full human being. The structure that emerges from a close reading of the stories does indeed present an implicit therapeutic model. Carl Jung s theories of the normative human self articulate with some precision Lu Xun s implicit vision of spiritual cure. Jung, one of three key founders of modern Western psychology, grounded his understanding of the human psyche in personal self-scrutiny and extensive clinical practice, and so his theories offer a validated psychological model for interpreting the textual evidence. Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung thus deploys a new methodology and proposes a new model for interpreting Lu Xun s two collections of modern short stories. The study demonstrates that in fact Lu Xun had a clear but implicit model of spiritual healing and cure. He began with the assumption that this psycho-dynamic paradigm might apply in all arenas of Chinese life and so tested out this premise imaginatively through his stories. The conclusion embedded in his fiction is that in the domains of nation and community, healing would not be possible without revolutionary change, but that healing was possible, although hardly likely, within the confines of family and the self. Viewing the stories of Call to Arms and Wandering through this lens often yields important new insights about individual stories. Even when it does not, the approach draws attention to the commonalities disguised by the great variety of plots, characters, and narrative strategies. Further, this approach incorporates and generalizes the more limited way of viewing the stories in terms of class analysis, and it complements the historical and biographical discussion of these works. Perhaps more important is that understanding Lu Xun s psychological model opens new ways of imagining the relevance of his stories to timeless human concerns. Contemporary scholars increasingly ask about Lu Xun s value now that the overt subjects of his concerns have receded into the past, and they have also looked to understand his role in the context of the international intellectual currents of his time. Although not primarily concerned with the sources of Lu Xun s creativity, this study does suggest resonances between the structure of his thought as revealed in the stories and that of key nineteenth-century European philosophers and writers. Even while being firmly grounded in his own times, Lu Xun evoked universal themes and archetypes of the human condition. This book will appeal to scholars in Asian studies, comparative literature, and psychology.

This book explores a new and innovative topic the relationship between geographical advancements in the Mid-Tang period (790s to 820s) and spatial imaginaries in contemporaneous literature. Historically and politically, the Mid-Tang period is generally considered to be a period of imperial reconstruction following the chaos of the An Lushan Rebellion (755 763), a rebellion that had a profound impact not only on the Tang empire but also on all of Chinese history. On the one hand, this era witnessed a heightened geographical awareness and a rapid development and accumulation of geographical knowledge, as was manifested in the governmental production of local map-guides and the invention of some monumental world maps. On the other hand, Mid-Tang literature represents one of the peaks of traditional Chinese literature and is known for its diversity of genres and innovative and imaginative engagement with space. For the first time in Tang scholarship, this study identifies the epistemological and aesthetic interplay between geography and literature in medieval China and investigates how this thus-far neglected interplay shaped the Mid-Tang literary imagination. This interdisciplinary investigation uncovers a rich cultural history of human exploration of the world on both fronts and provides a fresh reading of some of the most famous works of Tang literature, for example Li He s poetry and Liu Zongyuan s landscape essays. This study reveals some unique phenomena in genre development and individual creation in Mid-Tang literature and deepens our understanding of the inner workings and internal drive of traditional Chinese literature in general. This book expands and deepens the exploration of the interactions between literature and geography. Literary geography has been an active interdisciplinary field ever since the 1970s. In the early years as the field was taking shape, it was widely criticized for its instrumentalization of literary texts as unproblematic sources for empirical geographical study. In recent years, however, literary scholars have become increasingly interested in treating literary texts as another form of geography, or spatial organization, as many key literary elements, such as setting and milieu in fiction and imagery arrangement in poetry, involve spatial understanding on a fundamental level. This study takes two important approaches regarding the ongoing debates in the field of literary geography. Inasmuch as traditional Chinese intellectual culture prioritized broad learning over specialization, disciplinary boundaries were unclear and literati were often multitalented. Accordingly, in the cases examined in this book, these literary masters were also cartographers, geographical writers, or at least experienced readers of geographical works. Therefore, the study s approach does not treat either literature or geography as instrumental to the other, but rather examines how these two interrelated fields formed a shared intellectual horizon among the literati and found entrance to each other to create new knowledge, perspectives, and metaphors. This study also does not regard literature as a metaphorical geography in a generalized sense, but is specifically focused on how the geographic proficiency of literary authors informed their literature. Together, these two approaches suggest new possibilities of interdisciplinary exchange and offer a new perspective on the results of such exchanges as embodied in literary creation. This book will be a welcome resource for scholars and students in Chinese literature, historical geography, cultural history, and art history.

Wet nursing in Brazil dates to approximately the late eighteenth century when upper-class families used black women slaves to breastfeed their white infants. Soon use of a black wet nurse became the norm among elite families in various parts of the country. Wet nursing developed into a business based on the need for breast milk, and the purchase, sale, and renting of slaves to meet the demand. In the late nineteenth century, a growing number of medical experts and abolitionists lobbied against wet nursing. Their efforts, combined with the abolition of slavery and the switch to a Republican government, triggered a decline in the practice. Nevertheless, this custom had become so deep-rooted and widespread that it only became fully obsolete in the 1920s. Brazil s history of wet nursing was recorded in artistic renderings. Europeans were the first to depict these black women slaves in their paintings and prints in the first half of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, international and national photographers created studio portraits of wet nurses with their white charges. Only in the twentieth century, when the nation was struggling with race relations post-abolition, did white artists acknowledge that the black women wet nurses were biological mothers, themselves, in their paintings. Since then, a small number of sculptors have used the black wet nurse as an artistic subject. While scholars have identified samba, Carnaval, and Candombl as forms of expression through which to explore the topic of race in Brazil, more studies of how art has functioned as a reflection of race relations are needed. One might expect the anonymous black wet nurse to have faded into obscurity well before the start of the twenty-first century; yet, this female figure remains a durable subject of artistic renderings and discourse on racial politics. This study uses renderings of the black wet nurse as a lens through which to explore broader social developments in Brazilian history and to analyze how artistic representations of this body of women have both followed and challenged dominant attitudes toward race and the memory of slavery. Of the enslaved blacks who were used for a variety of types of labor in the urban and rural settings, and who also feature in artistic renderings, this black wet nurse is the only one who continues to be referenced in contemporary visual culture and discussions of race relations in Brazil. This is the first study to bring together a number of prints, photographs, paintings, and sculptures of this female figure from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and S o Paulo, and to not only consider the works in their individual artistic and historical contexts, but also in relation to each other. The range of different types of artworks underscores the fact that the black wet nurses were not simply marginalized types, relegated to the memory of the era of slavery, but a complex group of women who, in fact, nourished a nation. Black Women Slaves Who Nourished A Nation: Artistic Renderings of Wet Nurses in Brazil is an important book for art history, Latin American, and African diaspora collections.

In the span of little more than a decade, Paul Auster and Philip Roth two writers radically dissimilar in style and vision each produced a series of texts that bore the imprint of the author s father s death. This study examines these two series: Auster s The Invention of Solitude (1982) and The New York Trilogy (1987), and Roth s The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), and Operation Shylock (1993). Within these two transgeneric series, Auster and Roth juxtaposed the textual incorporation of their given names with the thanatographic acts they dedicated to their fathers, Sam Auster and Herman Roth. This juxtaposition prompts us to reflect upon the status of the author s given name as a textual inheritance and vehicle of communal memory. Auster s and Roth s assertions of artistic autonomy from familial and ethnoreligious obligations have been career-defining. However (and perhaps unsurprisingly), the writing prompted by the deaths of their fathers retraces their respective itineraries as Jewish sons and as American writers. As these itineraries unfold, aesthetic differences between the two authors cannot obscure the historical commonalities shared by two men born fourteen years apart in Newark, New Jersey, as grandsons to the Galician Jewish immigrants who bore the names Auster and Roth across the Atlantic and into American life. By examining the composition histories of and the intertextual indebtedness within each of these series, this study offers a reading of Auster s and Roth s works as forms of kaddish. While readers may be justifiably skeptical at the thought of placing liturgical language in the mouths of avowedly secular writers, this study argues that Auster s and Roth s works engage, tendentiously, in a discourse that reconciles the bereaved child to the limitations, merits, and the loss of the deceased parent. In doing so, these writers are drawn into a broader discourse of Jewish filiation in the United States under conditions that oblige them to subordinate their originality as literary authors to their derivativeness as historical and genealogical subjects. To read these texts as kaddishim is to recognize Auster and Roth as being engaged in active projects of inheriting the names, myths, and historical predicaments entailed by being their fathers sons.

Ecuadorian and other Latin American activists and academics involved in decolonial political projects. Emanating from social sectors marginalized by the processes of modernity, interculturality provides a grounded critique of the ethnic, class, gender and epistemic exclusions of modern liberal hegemony. Assuming a decolonial standpoint, intercultural theorists argue that a just and sustainable society can only be built by working to rid social institutions of structural inequalities and exclusionary practices. They reject the notion that any one tradition has all of the answers to social problems, instead insisting that solutions are created in the spaces between cultures. So long as inequality and exclusion exist, however, knowledge, practice and cooperation can never be truly shared. This book examines cultural and political changes in Ecuador, and particularly in the Otavalo Valley of the Northern Sierra, in the wake of the country s Indigenous movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The primary focus is on the decade between 2006 and 2016. This period represents an important juncture, as people in Indigenous communities began constructing the new normal after a time of profound political, cultural and social change, brought about by the concerted effort of their organizations. The election of Rafael Correa on a very progressive platform also represented, ironically, the decline of the national Indigenous organizations as institutional political actors. That is not to say their disappearance, but rather their transformation into something else. The new normal also does not imply a complete break with the past and the forging together of something completely different. Rather, it was the weaving together of different strands of the cultural tapestry of collective life. Many Kichwa people in this period continued to live and rework their traditional practices and belief in a context of greater exposure to and contact with other cultural groups. Although these communities were never isolated from others their relationship changed as a result of the mobilizations from 1990s onward. Those mobilizations themselves, of course, were part of a much longer historic trajectory of resistance, autonomous development, and internal and external negotiations. The construction of this new normal, finally, did not happen simply as the manifestation of some collective will. Rather it was the result of multiple and constant negotiations as individuals and groups asserted new or transformed identities and practices while they navigated drastically changed landscapes, some of their own doing and some well beyond their control. The movement s fight for the rights of Indigenous peoples, while focused on issues of land rights, political participation, autonomy and cultural difference, never called for separation from its majority Mestizo population. Instead, the movement articulated its demands around a call for interculturality, that is, a process through which the country s different cultural groups ought to seek out new relationships built on equality, respect, coexistence and mutual learning to create the conditions for a more just and sustainable country. While on the surface such a proposal might seem little different than multiculturalism, it staked out a decolonial position by recognizing that not only were cultural groups different, but that their relationships were built on historic and continuing inequality. They demanded, therefore, a profound transformation of cultural, political and epistemological structures. Intercultural Interventions: Politics, Community, and Environment in the Otavalo Valley documents and analyzes how the concept of interculturality intervened in theoretical discussions of social change, the disruption of colonial-era political institutions in Otavalo and Cotacachi, the re-constitution of the idea of Kichwa community, and how intercultural strategies were used to define and implement solutions to environmental problems. By paying attention to the often uneven and ambiguous ways in which interculturality intervened in people s public lives as a result of the success of the Indigenous movement, this book contributes to decolonial theory by connecting that critique to the complex changes that took place in Andean Kichwa Ecuador of the first part of the twenty-first century.

One of the largest casino-entertainment venues in Macao is called City of Dreams. True to its name, it is a city unto itself, devoted entirely to pleasure, consumption and luxury living. The massive campus includes luxury residences and high-end retail stores, restaurants, spas, extravagant performance venues and, of course, gaming facilities. The City of Dreams is an enclosed city with its own interior boulevards and its own theater district, called Soho. It even has its own blue-chip architecture, the Morpheus, a luxury hotel designed by the late Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE, using the world s most advanced and innovative building technology. This is a study of the nature of casino cities through Macao s stories. The author examines how the development of the city into a world gambling and entertainment capital affects the daily lives of the city s residents. The literary or filmic narratives of Macao capture how it feels to be citizens of these cities, the emotional responses, and thoughts of those who living within the conditions of these dreamworlds. But importantly, they also reveal the kinds of imagination and creativity of those living there and their strategies of taking hold of the narrative of the city for themselves, against the dominant state discourse. The writings discussed in this volume are all published after the liberalization of the gambling industry in Macao in 2002, when the city embarked on an accelerated and dramatic transformation. The contemporary literary scene in Macao is lively and diverse, impressive given how small the population the population is (a little over 600,000) vis- -vis an all-encompassing casino industry and the tens of millions of tourists it brings to the city every year. The author discusses works from fiction writers who live and work primarily in Macao, as well as refer to the works of essayists and social commentators who regularly publish in the local print media. Also included are writers who might not have a resident card but have strong personal or historic ties to the city, either through a career opportunity that brought them there, family history, or having grown up there. The author uses their works to study the effect of contemporary Macao on the global imagination, especially under the current regime of global circulation of capital and people. Through these works, the author presents another way of understanding Macao, beyond the official measures of GDPs and economics. The author captures the often-inarticulate sentiments and aspirations of the common people, in order to challenge and change the direction, discursive as well as political, of the society. In so doing, the author overlays the official ideology of this kind of casino city that Macao represents with a complex network of the experiences and stories of those who live in it, under its specific economic and social compulsions. In each chapter of this volume, the author examines particular works that illustrate a different experiential and emotional phenomenon of life in this city.

By charting a history in which sensualist poetry reached unprecedented and unsurpassed heights through late Ming poets, experienced a period of hibernation during most of the Qing, and then reemerged to awaken the senses of late Qing and early Republican readers, The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China brings to light an important Chinese literary tradition and underscores intellectual trends that have been neglected, marginalized, misunderstood, and even condemned. Uncovering an important but neglected part of history during which the freelance intelligentsia, who emerged in late imperial and early Republican China, countered the political mainstream by drawing on a long yet marginalized tradition of sensual lyricism, this book offers the first history of how fragrant and bedazzling (xiangyan) became a guiding aesthetic of countercultural movements from the late Ming to the early Republican era roughly, from the late sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. Sensualist poets and other writers of these eras extolled amorous desire and romantic love. Through erotic poetry, they rebelled against not only orthodox Neo-Confucianism but also the radical cultural reform agenda of the late Qing and the New Culture Movement of the Republic. In eras that emphasized sociopolitical functions of literature, they promoted classical lyricism and the satisfaction of individual expressive needs. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book argues that sensual lyricism is more political than its sensuous surfaces and that China s lyrical tradition is sexier and more modern than existing histories have led us to believe. This study demonstrates that dominant political ideologies and cultural practices of early modern China always faced counteractions in the form of a discourse of sensuality, femininity, and romance. The book examines myriad primary sources, such as the monumental anthologies of sensual poetry compiled in both the late Ming and the late Qing periods, which are brought to critical attention for the first time. Bridging literary and intellectual history, the study surveys three hundred years of poetry and essays, from individual collections to voluminous anthologies, and from traditional books to modern magazines. The first half of the book focuses on materials produced during the Ming, and the second half examines publications of the turn of the twentieth century. In her examination of these sources, Xiaorong Li shows that the poetics of sensuality was political on personal and historical levels during and beyond the late imperial period. Sensuality and decadence, Li argues, were forces of literary modernization, as well as an important continuity between the eras often referred to as premodern and modern. Li also relates Chinese sensual literature to decadent movements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. In both contexts, while perceived as a reflection of moral decay, decadent literature posed challenges to social and cultural norms by representing the repressed individual body and its cultural expressions. This comparative perspective brings us toward a better understanding of sensualism as a part of modernity.

John Banville is one of Ireland s greatest contemporary prose writers, widely known as the master of simile and metaphor. An artful explorer of the murky waters of memory, he is a relentless prober of the uncertainty of the human condition. In addition to a number of plays, and innumerable magazine and newspaper articles, Banville s sixteen novels have been enthusiastically received. In 2005, The Sea won the Man Booker Prize. Banville then went on to win the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011, the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature in 2013, and the Prince of Asturias Award, the sought-after Spanish literary prize, in 2014. There has been talk too about Banville being a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. It is thus not surprising that scholars have paid close attention to Banville s work since his debut in the 1970s. His writing about the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries presents a stirring and disturbing view of a world made opaque by deceptive appearances. Social philosopher Jean Baudrillard s ideas on simulation provide an interesting lens for examining Banville s work because Baudrillard has envisioned a universe perhaps even bleaker than Banville s in which men and women lose their bearings. To Baudrillard, men and women lose their bearings in a universe where nobody is representative of anything and where they risk becoming simulacra copies without originals or connection to their real selves. Reading Banville through Baudrillard elucidates Banville s universe of radical uncertainty. This study is the first to apply aspects of Jean Baudrillard s thinking on simulation to John Banville s work by tracing and analyzing instances of simulation in seven novels and two plays, which were published in 1997 2015, by Banville. The analysis sheds light on issues of duplicity, usurped identities, masks and masking, and the instability of self and reality. It shows how Banville s work is in dialogue with the Baudrillard s idea that simulation is an important mode of perception. There is a network of multiple and mutating connections which extend backward into the far reaches of past mythologies and forward into such realms of postmodernity as Baudrillard envisions in his descriptions of the third order of simulacra. Close readings of these texts by Banville reveal the presence of Baudrillard s ideas incorporated in them. These include a tendency for things to float, copies to replace originals, connections to the real to be distorted or absent, and in at least one novel the entire human world to be an artful copy of a lost or nonextant original. As for the self, Baudrillard seems to envision the self as a wholly operational molecule, spinning within an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. Banville s narrating central characters, although tending to search for a unified self, are instead likely to find a vacancy at their core. Self emerges as an ignis fatuus a ghost light fanning its own illusions of self-determination. A sense of vertiginous proximity to an existential void is a compelling presence in Banville s texts and suggests that at their center, too, lies a vacancy, a void. This study also finds that in Banville s work, creative acts of transformation and renewal provide a means however fleeting for resisting and managing that void. By reading Banville through Baudrillard, we gain important insights into Banville s view of the human condition. Reading John Banville Through Jean Baudrillard is an important resource for scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of contemporary literature and Irish studies.