Madmen and Other Survivors

Madmen and Other Survivors
Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2007-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 962209824X

Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun's Fiction puts the short stories written by this outstanding Chinese writer between 1918 and 1926 into a broad context of Modernism. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881–1936) deals with the China moving beyond the 1911 Revolution. He asks about the possibilities of survival, and what that means, even considering the possibility that madness might be a strategy by which that is possible. Such an idea calls identity into question, and Lu Xun is read here as a writer for whom that is a wholly problematic concept. The book makes use of critical and cultural theory to consider these short stories in the context of not only Chinese fiction, but in terms of the art of the short story, and in relation to literary modernism. It attempts to put Lu Xun into as wide a perspective as possible for contemporary reading. To make his work widely accessible, he is treated here in English translation.

MadMen

MadMen
Author: Nan Klee
Publisher:
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2020-07-13
Genre:
ISBN:

As William, Hannah, Marshall, and the assemblage of survivors blend together to become a Co-op farm community, cattle and horses begin to arrive - thanks to Hannah's Talents. Crops are planted, and hunting parties ride on horseback. Judica has a litter of pup. Penny and Tom's first child arrives, and many speculate about whose child Jennifer carries. Though radio contacts, the Memphis farm survivors learn that the Chinese Army has advanced across the western half of the US killing any American survivors they find. As the threat approaches the Mississippi River, William, Hannah, and the survivors begin to speculate about what can be done. Enemy scouts begin to threaten other survivors in the area, so William leads a select few of his Talented people in early morning raids. Tom and Marshall soon have to use the jet to destroy all the bridges that span the Mississippi to slow the Red Army's advance. An equally Talented nameless nemesis arrives to terrorize the co-op, stealing Marshall's soul, but Hannah and her women thwart that plan. After their successful attack on 3 Chinese tanks, the now-desperate leadership team must determine how the 20+ survivors can safely escape. But... Where can they escape to?

A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism

A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism
Author: Eric Hayot
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2016-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231543069

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to think of modernism globally. Providing alternative approaches, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism introduces pathways through global archives and new frameworks that offer a richer, more representative set of concepts for the analysis of literary and cultural works. In separate essays each inspired by a critical term, this collection explores what happens to the foundational concepts of modernism and the methods we bring to modernist studies when we approach the field as a global phenomenon. Their work transforms the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism, such as tradition, antiquity, style, and translation. New paradigms, such as context, slum, copy, pantomime, and puppets emerge as the archive extends beyond its European center. In bringing together and reexamining the familiar as well as the emergent, the contributors to this volume offer an invaluable and original approach to studying the intersection of world literature and modernist studies.

The Stability of Laughter

The Stability of Laughter
Author: James Nikopoulos
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-12-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 042963966X

A "sad and corrupt" age, a period of "crisis" and "upheaval"—what T.S. Eliot famously summed up as "the panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism has always been characterized by its self-conscious sense of suffering. Why, then, was it so obsessed with laughter? From Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud to Pirandello, Beckett, Hughes, Barnes, and Joyce, no moment in cultural history has written about laughter this much. James Nikopoulos investigates modernity’s paradoxical relationship with mirth. Why was the gesture we conventionally associate with happiness deemed the only sensible way of responding to a world, as Max Weber wrote, that had been "disenchanted of its gods?" In answering these questions, Nikopoulos also delves into our ongoing relationship with laughter. He looks to contemporary research in emotion and evolutionary theory, as well as to the two-thousand-plus-year history of the philosophy of humor, in order to propose a novel way of understanding laughter, humor, and their complicated relationships with modern life. The Stability of Laughter explores how art unsettles the simplifications we revert to in our attempts to make sense of human history and social interaction.

MadMen: Through the Waiting

MadMen: Through the Waiting
Author: Nan Klee
Publisher:
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2020-04-13
Genre:
ISBN:

As William Martin's presence unnerves the survivors at the university's abandon faculty house, Hannah's former lover, Marshall Roberts arrives with a disturbing proclamation. That same night, William viciously attacks Marshall, angrily throwing lightning bolts at the man. Hannah intervenes and stops it. Psychically manipulating Marshall to be elsewhere, while squelching Hannah's protests, William uses his persuasion Talent to force her to "jump the broom" with him. Despite being "married", William practices celibacy as the household struggles to survive an extraordinarily harsh winter. Marshall and Hannah quietly continue their friendship. As supplies dwindle and others hunt for wild game, Hannah's greenhouse thrives until the survivors' hydroelectric source freezes over, and they are forced to caravan south through 10-foot walls of snow.

Inside China's Legal System

Inside China's Legal System
Author: Chang Wang
Publisher: Chandos Publishing
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0857094610

China’s legal system is vast and complex, and robust scholarship on the subject is difficult to obtain. Inside China’s Legal System provides readers with a comprehensive look at the system including how it works in practice, theoretical and historical underpinnings, and how it might evolve. The first section of the book explains the Communist Party’s utilitarian approach to law: rule by law. The second section discusses Confucian and Legalist views on morality, law and punishment, and the influence such traditional Chinese thinking has on contemporary Chinese law. The third section focuses on the roles of key players (including judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and legal academics) in the Chinese legal system. The fourth section offers Chinese legal case studies in civil, criminal, administrative, and international law. The book concludes with a comparison of China’s fundamental governing and legal principles with those of the United States, in such areas as checks and balances, separation of powers, and due process. Uses extensive legal materials and historical documents generally unavailable to Western based academics Gives insider knowledge, including first-hand experience teaching law, and close involvement with judges, attorneys, and law professors in China Analyses legal issues from historical and cultural perspectives holistically

No Man's Land

No Man's Land
Author: John Toland
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 862
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0525563261

1918: The end of the war to end all wars. The end of an era for victors and vanquished alike. When Germany launched the Ludendorf Offensives—the most massive military bombardment of World War I—they seemed certain to win. But when American troops began arriving in droves, the Allies' certain defeat became a decisive victory. No Man's Land takes us into the trenches, behind enemy lines, into military strategy sessions and through the corridors of power in London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington in a brilliant account of one of the most fateful years in Western history. Drawing on new sources—diaries, memoirs, vivid personal experiences—here is a book that for sheer excitement, drama, vigor, and emotional impact rivals the greatest novels, history marvelously told by the incomparable John Toland. "A compelling human picture...a marvelous job by a master of the big-canvas history." Business Week

Allegory

Allegory
Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2009-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134298307

Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century. In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling: presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present day considers the relationship between allegory and symbolism analyses the use of allegory in modernist debate and deconstruction, looking at critics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man provides a full glossary of technical terms and suggestions for further reading. Allegory offers an accessible, clear introduction to the history and use of this complex literary device. It is the ideal tool for all those seeking a greater understanding of texts that make use of allegory and of the significance of allegorical thinking to literature.

Modernisation of Chinese Culture

Modernisation of Chinese Culture
Author: Jana S. Rošker
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2014-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443867721

The editors are grateful to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for its generous support of their research work which enabled them to publish the present book. The present book carefully maps the Chinese modernisation discourse, highlighting its relationship to other, similar discourses, and situating it within historical and theoretical contexts. In contrast to the majority of recent discussions of a “Chinese development model” that tend to focus more on institutional then cultural factors, and are more narrowly concerned with economic matters than overall social development, the book offers several important focal points for many presently overlooked issues and dilemmas. The multifaceted perspectives contained in this anthology are not limited to economic, social, and ecological issues, but also include political and social functions of ideologies and cultural conditioned values, representing the axial epistemological grounds of modern Chinese society. 2011 was the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution. The centennial is relevant not only in terms of state ideology, but also plays a significant role within academic research into Chinese society and culture. This historic turning point likewise represents the symbolic and concrete linkages and tensions between tradition and modernity, progress and conservatism, traditional values and the demands for adjustment to contemporary societies. The book shows that Chinese transition from tradition to modernity cannot be understood in a framework of a unified general model of society, but rather through a more complex insight into the interrelations among elements of physical environment, social structure, philosophy, history, and culture.

Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America

Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America
Author: Rob Hardy
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9811635560

This book, the first single-authored book-length study of Buck’s fiction for over twenty years, shows how Buck’s thought developed through the medium of her fiction - from her early turbulent years in China to her last lonely days in the United States, with chapters examining her loss of faith in Christianity, her reflections on Chinese life during and after the breakdown of Old China, her voluminous reading, her confrontation with the horrors of American racism and sexism after her return to the United States, and her final metaphorical search for home as she approached death. The book argues that Buck, the first American woman to win both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes for literature, was a heroic forerunner of those who, while occupying a place in the world, never feel fully at home there; in Buck’s case because her Chinese identity throughout her life struggled with her American. For this reason Pearl S. Buck’s fiction deserves to be considered alongside that of writers such as Anchee Min, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. The book’s central claim is that Buck is a major novelist, capable of speaking to the distress of our times, richly deserving the honor she has received in China, and deserving greater recognition in the United States.