Mrs. Spring Fragrance

Mrs. Spring Fragrance
Author: Sui Sin Far
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1513276867

Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) is a collection of short stories by Sui Sin Far. Inspired by her experience living among Chinese Americans in San Francisco and Seattle, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is considered one of the earliest works of fiction published in the United States by a woman of Chinese heritage. In “The Inferior Woman,” Mrs. Spring Fragrance encounters her neighbors, the Carmans, as they try to find someone to marry their son. While Mrs. Carman wants him to marry into a family of higher social standing, her son is in love with a local girl who works as a legal secretary. Known by Mrs. Carman as the “Inferior Woman,” she has risen through hard work and perseverance to achieve her position at the law firm. Sympathetic toward her neighbor’s son, Mrs. Spring Fragrance advocates on his behalf. “In the Land of the Free” is the story of a Chinese immigrant who is separated from her young son upon arrival due to insufficient paperwork. Exploring the struggles of this woman to reclaim her son, Sui Sin Far exposes the discrimination and hardships faced by Chinese Americans due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, illuminating the byzantine and restrictive immigration policies which sadly continue under a different guise in modern America. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance is a classic of Chinese American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton

Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton
Author: Annette White Parks
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1995
Genre: Authors, Canadian
ISBN: 9780252021138

This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times. The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912, in the United States. Her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, has been out of print since 1914. Today Sui Sin Far is being rediscovered as part of American literature and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinatowns, not in the mode of the "yellow peril" literature in vogue at the time but with an insider's sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American women and children, and she responded to the social divisions and discrimination that confronted her by experimenting with trickster characters and tools of irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization to which their race, class, or gender consigned them in that era. "Superbly researched, thoughtfully reasoned, and beautifully written. . . . Will be the foundation for all future work on Sui Sin Far." -- Elizabeth Ammons, author of Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century

Assimilating Asians

Assimilating Asians
Author: Patricia P. Chu
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2000-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780822324652

DIVThis work combines social theory with literary analysis to look at how Asian American writers use literature to participate in the critique and analysis of their position in US culture./div

Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings

Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings
Author: Sui Sin Far
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1995
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780252064197

Reprints stories from Mrs. Spring Fragrance by the first published Asian North American fiction writer

Discovering Fiction, An Introduction Teacher's Manual

Discovering Fiction, An Introduction Teacher's Manual
Author: Judith Kay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2008-05-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780521703918

Authentic North American short stories enhance students' reading skills, language learning, and enjoyment of literature. The Teacher's Manual provides tips and strategies on how to teach the different exercise types in a chapter. In addition, the authors provide interpretative commentary on the readings, helping teachers gain a literary appreciation of the text. Finally, a complete answer key is provided, including suggested answers to the critical thinking questions.

The Phantom Image

The Phantom Image
Author: Patrick R. Crowley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022664829X

Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics, Patrick R. Crowley investigates how something as insubstantial as a ghost could be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint. In this fresh and wide-ranging study, he uses the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, Crowley shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of afterlife, these images show us something about the visual event of seeing itself. The Phantom Image offers essential insight into ancient art, visual culture, and the history of the image.

Competing Stories

Competing Stories
Author: James Stamant
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2019-11-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498593453

Major changes in media in the late 19th and early 20th centuries challenged traditional ideas about artistic representation and opened new avenues for authors working in the modernist period. Modernist authors’ reactions to this changing media landscape were often fraught with complications and shed light on the difficulty of negotiating, understanding, and depicting media. The author of Competing Stories: Modernist Authors, Newspapers, and the Movies argues that negative depictions of newspapers and movies, in modernist fiction, largely stem from worries about the competition for modern audiences and the desire for control over storytelling and reflections of the modern world. This book looks at a moment of major change in media, the dominance of mass media that began with the primarily visual media of newspapers and movies, and the ways that authors like Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and others responded. The author contends that an examination of this moment may facilitate a better understanding of the relationship between media and authorship in our constantly shifting media landscape.

Blue Light of the Screen

Blue Light of the Screen
Author: Claire Cronin
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1913462064

Blue Light of the Screen is a memoir about the author's obsession with horror and the supernatural. Blue Light of the Screen is about what it means to be afraid -- about immersion, superstition, delusion, and the things that keep us up at night. A creative-critical memoir of the author's obsession with the horror genre, Blue Light of the Screen embeds its criticism of horror within a larger personal story of growing up in a devoutly Catholic family, overcoming suicidal depression, uncovering intergenerational trauma, and encountering real and imagined ghosts. As Cronin writes, she positions herself as a protagonist who is haunted by what she watches and reads, like an antiquarian in an M.R. James ghost story whose sense of reality unravels through her study of arcane texts and cursed archives. In this way, Blue Light of the Screen tells the story of the author's conversion from skepticism to faith in the supernatural. Part memoir, part ghost story, and part critical theory, Blue Light of the Screen is not just a book about horror, but a work of horror itself.

The Center of the World

The Center of the World
Author: June Howard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198821395

This book studies literary regionalism and it shows that one of the ways we imagine the world is through writing and reading about particular places. It explores how writers are shaped by particular places and how their stories shape our understanding of localities and the globe.