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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2017Asia in Western fiction
by Robin Winks
Any reader who has ever visited Asia knows that the great bulk of Western-language fiction about Asian cultures turns on stereotypes. This book, a collection of essays, explores the problem of entering Asian societies through Western fiction, since this is the major port of entry for most school children, university students and most adults. In the thirteenth century, serious attempts were made to understand Asian literature for its own sake. Hau Kioou Choaan, a typical Chinese novel, was quite different from the wild and magical pseudo-Oriental tales. European perceptions of the Muslim world are centuries old, originating in medieval Christendom's encounter with Islam in the age of the Crusades. There is explicit and sustained criticism of medieval mores and values in Scott's novels set in the Middle Ages, and this is to be true of much English-language historical fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even mediocre novels take on momentary importance because of the pervasive power of India. The awesome, remote and inaccessible Himalayas inevitably became for Western writers an idealised setting for novels of magic, romance and high adventure, and for travellers' tales that read like fiction. Chinese fictions flourish in many guises. Most contemporary Hong Kong fiction reinforced corrupt mandarins, barbaric punishments and heathens. Of the novels about Japan published after 1945, two may serve to frame a discussion of Japanese behaviour as it could be observed (or imagined) by prisoners of war: Black Fountains and Three Bamboos.
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2023
The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction
by Rob Breton
Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.
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Literature & Literary StudiesSeptember 2018Treating This World with Gentleness
by Wan Hongyou
This book is a collection of essays by Wan Hongyou. Wan Hongyou's literary construction bases on love. It is the rich feelings abundance of people, society, and life that fill our hearts. This "rich feelings" is like a tangible and invisible red silk thread, leading his ideas, nourishing his style, full of his language, and instigating his inspiration. His work is thus sparkling with poetry. In the text, there is a perception of life and work, as well as a concern for social reality. Under the words, there is a hot heart hidden.Walking in the world, everyone has poetry and ideals in their hearts. Let it be, we should learn to be gentle with the world.
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FictionOctober 2018Cat
by Wan Yan
“Cat” tells the story of editors, writers, poets, painters and other characters in the literary circle. There are editorial department, pen meeting, group draft, and writers’ emotional entanglements. With a profound metaphorical approach, through special literary narratives and humanity observations, the writer jumped out of the world to see the world's sharpness and calmness with the recording of cat's eyes. The ancient cats are metaphors of modernity, and the literary story code at the end of a century. A vain, wandering and shining performance, a kind of chaos of illusion and reality, life and death. An editor-in-chief named "Feng Niang" and a deputy editor-in-chief called "Old Deng" were intentionally or unintentionally involved in the whirlpool of the literary world. These emotional, ideal, earthly, spiritual, and life vortexes are mixed in literature.
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June 2023Dust between Earth and Heaven
by Pan Feng has published many essays, stories, and mini-stories in national literary journals, including "Love to the Western Hunan", "Sunshine Journey", "The Cattle", "The Fake Buddha", "The Chess Game", etc.
The novel, Dust between Earth and Heaven, is a literary work created by Pan Feng, an author born in Hunan, based on his family history, which spans a century.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2017
Imperialism and juvenile literature
by Jeffrey Richards
Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this truer than in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. It both reflects popular attitudes, ideas and preconceptions and it generates support for selected views and opinions. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late-Victorian and Edwardian times: in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education and the iconography of popular art. It seeks to examine in detail the articulation and diffusion of imperialism in the field of juvenile literature by stressing its pervasiveness across boundaries of class, nation and gender. It analyses the production, distribution and marketing of imperially-charged juvenile fiction, stressing the significance of the Victorians' discovery of adolescence, technological advance and educational reforms as the context of the great expansion of such literature. An overview of the phenomenon of Robinson Crusoe follows, tracing the process of its transformation into a classic text of imperialism and imperial masculinity for boys. The imperial commitment took to the air in the form of the heroic airmen of inter-war fiction. The book highlights that athleticism, imperialism and militarism become enmeshed at the public schools. It also explores the promotion of imperialism and imperialist role models in fiction for girls, particularly Girl Guide stories.
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Biography & True StoriesNovember 2024Walking in the dark
James Baldwin, my father and I
by Douglas Field
A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestoes of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance. Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. In Walking in the dark, he embarks on a journey to unravel his life-long fascination and to understand why Baldwin continues to enthral us decades after his death. Tracing Baldwin's footsteps in France, the US and Switzerland, and digging into archives, Field paints an intimate portrait of the writer's life and influence. At the same time, he offers a poignant account of coming to terms with his father's Alzheimer's disease. Interweaving Baldwin's writings on family, illness, memory and place, Walking in the dark is an eloquent testament to the enduring power of great literature to illuminate our paths.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2023
Cormac McCarthy
A complexity theory of literature
by Lydia R. Cooper
Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy's literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shapes our value systems. In a world recovering from global economic crisis and poised on the brink of another, studying the methods by which literature interrogates narratives of inevitability around global economic inequality and eco-disaster is ever more relevant.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMay 2023
Counterfactual Romanticism
by Damian Walford Davies
Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date - and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2024Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature
by Carolyne Larrington
Over the last twenty-five years, the 'history of emotion' field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature - in particular secular literature - as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past. The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences - those who read them or hear them read or performed?
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Business, Economics & LawJune 2019Literary Tourism
Theories, Practice and Case Studies
by Ian Jenkins, Katrín Anna Lund
Literary tourism is a nascent field in tourism studies, yet tourists often travel in the footsteps of well-known authors and stories. Providing a wide-ranging cornucopia of literary tourism topics, this book fully explores the interconnections between the written word and travel. It includes tourism stories using guidebooks, films, television and electronic media, and recognises that stories, texts and narratives, even if they cannot be classified as traditional travel writing, can become journeys in themselves and take us on imaginary voyages. Furthermore, the book: - Provides a grounding in the theoretical perspectives on literature and the tourist experience; - Explores practical applications of literary tourism, such as destination promotion and creation, responsible tourism and learning benefits; - Uses global case studies to study literary tourism in action. Appealing to a wide audience of different disciplines, it encompasses subjects such as business literary writing, historical journeys and the poetry of Dylan Thomas. The use of these different perspectives demonstrates how heavily and widely literature influences travel, tourists and tourism, making it an important read for researchers and students of tourism, social science and literature.
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December 2015Gift of the Dark Mother Earth
by Can Xue
Gift of the Dark Mother Earth, the latest novel by Can Xue, is a profound metaphor of her hometown. It follows her usual magical style in the sense that it vividly unfolds the complex and delicate inner world of the characters. The story takes place in the remote Wuliqu School, with such distinctive characters as Teacher Meiyong, Zhang Danzhi, Yutian, Xiao Man, Uncle Yun and Sha Men presented one after another. The personality and human nature exposed through unique dialogues enable the readers to feel a return to simplicity so that they want to explore human soul and nature and start in-depth reading and thinking. The book depicts petty matters in a great age. The author’s ambition is to create a feeling for the pattern of the whole universe through the structure of an ordinary tree leaf, and to unify the arbitrarily split world through the narration of various folk sundries so that different characters can all become the center of this unity and their performance can have a universality. As the only Chinese writer who has won the Best Translated Book Award in the United States, Can Xue was nominated for the foreign novel prize of The Independent of the UK and shortlisted in the Neustadt International Prize for Literature of the US. As the Chinese woman writer, whose works have been translated and published the most abroad, Can Xue has been called the most creative Chinese writer by overseas critics.
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Children's & YABear Chasers at the Reindeer Camp
by Gerelchimeg Blackcrane
The story in the book happens deep inside the Daxing'anling mountains. For thousands of years, the Ewenkis made living by hunting and raising reindeer in the vast forest. They raised ferocious dogs to assist in hunting and camp guard. As time goes by and the world changes, the Ewenkis today are no longer hunting and the bloodline of their hunting dogs has ended. Instead, the tall, ferocious Mongolian shepherds who are able to chase away and kill wolves become the new camp guard responsible for protecting the reindeers. They drive off bears coveting the camp and grow into real bear chasers. Blackcrane is one of the few children's book authors who come from minority groups in China, which makes him special in China's literati. His works always offer a glimpse into "the call of the wild" from the forest in the north of China. In this original full-length children's novel published for the first time, Blackcrane not only focuses on the beauty of wildlife but also emphasizes the emotional connections between humans and animals, allowing children to not only be nourished by literature but gain authentic and accurate information on the broadness of nature.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJune 2022Medieval literary voices
by Louise D’Arcens, Sif Ríkharðsdóttir
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MedicineMay 2024Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession
A gendered opportunity
by Jane Brooks
This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. Nursing was nominally a profession but with its poor pay and harsh discipline, it was unpopular with British women. In the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. As the country faced inevitable war, the Government and the profession's elite courted refugees as an antidote to the shortages, but many hospitals refused to employ Continental Jews. The book explores the changes in the refugees' status and lives from the war years to the foundation of the National Health Service and to the latter decades of the twentieth century. It places the refugees at the forefront of manoeuvres in nursing practice, education and research at a time of social upheaval and alterations in the position of women.
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Literature & Literary Studies1997Toward a History of Ukrainian literature
by George G. Grabowicz
The work of the famous American-Ukrainian Slavologist and Ukrainian scholar Hryhoriy Hrabovych interprets the history of Ukrainian literature in several main ways: theoretical, comparative, immanent and historiographical. The book includes his studies, essays, and polemics written over the years. They were mainly produced in times of a sharp confrontation between official Soviet and Western approaches to literary studies. Today, after Ukraine gained its independence, there is an urgent need for a thorough reassessment of various scientific traditions and paradigms as well as a review of the canon of Ukrainian literature, its histography and methodology. The vast majority of these works were published in English or in sources unavailable for the Ukrainian reader, including specialist researchers. This edition can significantly reorient our understanding of the history of Ukrainian literature and enable a rethinking of Ukrainian cultural and intellectual processes.
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2002The question of literature
The place of the literary in contemporary theory
by Gerard Greenway, Elizabeth Beaumont-Bissell
As literary theory has grown more influential, interdisciplinary and sophisticated, it has come to concern itself with a much greater range of issues and objects than those traditionally considered literary. It now addresses philosophy, history, psychology, politics and the media. Addressing a central and fundamental, but relatively neglected, issue in literary theory, this title seeks to recontextualise how theory has changed our understanding of literature and its questions by relating literature to the institution of the university, to ethical judgements and values, new media and computer technology and the nature of representative democracy. ;
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The ArtsOctober 2023
Windows for the world
Nineteenth-century stained glass and the international exhibitions, 1851–1900
by Jasmine Allen
Windows for the world explores the display and reception of nineteenth-century British stained glass in a secular exhibition context. International in scope, the book focuses on the global development of stained glass in this period as showcased at, and influenced by, these exhibitions. It recognises those who made and exhibited stained glass and demonstrates the long-lasting impact of the classification and modes of display at these events. A number of exhibits are illustrated in colour and are analysed in relation to stylistic developments, techniques and material innovations, as well as the broader iconographies of nation and empire in the nineteenth century.
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 2022Kate Atkinson
by Armelle Parey
This timely in-depth study of award-winning Kate Atkinson's work provides a welcome comprehensive overview of the novels, play and short stories. It explores the major themes and aesthetic concerns in her fiction. Combining close analysis and literary contextualisation, it situates her multi-faceted work in terms of a hybridisation of genres and innovative narrative strategies to evoke contemporary issues and well as the past. Chapters offer insights into each major publication (from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war) in relation to the key concerns of Atkinson's fiction, including self-narrativisation, history, memory and women's lives.
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Seeing the World on a Fish
by Sheng Keyi
Seeing the World on a Fish is author's first children literature which created by Sheng Keyi. The author recalls his childhood with 60 pictures and 60 short essays, presenting the world of a kid's mind. In these 60 short essays, author uses calm way to lay out a series of shining moments, depicts a scene full of childlike life represented by "Grapes are sweet", "Pumping the gyroscope" and "Rolling the iron ring", which depict The works represented by "Eating loofah, thinking of dad", "Listening to grandpa tell stories" and "Giving dad a massage" show the strong affection of family, which makes people moved and cry.
