A compact and portable version of the best-selling and most-trusted world literature anthology, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Shorter Second Edition, is a rich and teachable selection of the world’s literature, in generous portions and the best translations available. A new format, new design, new selections, new translations, and new color plates make this Second Edition a pleasure to read and a book that students will keep long after the survey course is over. color plates

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A compendium of traditional Chinese literature offers a broad variety of genres including poetry, letters, stories, excerpts from novels and drama, philosophical writings, jokes, and other prose forms.

This book explores, through a series of essays, a set of interrelated elements that define the literary culture of China in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. This period, known as the Mid-Tang, broke with many of the intellectual habits of the “middle period” of Chinese culture and adumbrated many of the characteristics of China in the Song and later periods. The first essay examines “singularity,” representations of identity as an assertion of superiority over others and as an alienation that brings rejection by others. The second essay addresses different ways of representing landscapes, showing the ways in which the underlying order of nature had become a problem in the Mid-Tang. The third essay discusses the tendency to offer hypothetical explanations for phenomena that either run contrary to received wisdom or try to account for situations usually thought not to require explanation. When carried out at the level of pure play, such subjective acts of interpretation are wit, and the fourth essay analyzes playfully inflated interpretations of domestic spaces and leisure activities as a discourse of private valuation, articulated against commonsense values.

Product Description: This dual-language compilation of seven complete major works and many shorter pieces from the Confucian period through the Ch'ing dynasty will be indispensable to students of Chinese literature. Owen's masterful translations and commentaries have opened up Chinese literary thought to theorists and scholars of other languages...read more

Product Description: Owen (Chinese and comparative literature, Harvard) explores issues of love poetry in Chinese and Western poetry. He argues that comparisons need cross cultures and time periods. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Product Description: Hailed as the most important and most comprehensive single study of Tang poetry to have appeared in English when originally published by Yale University Press in 1981, this Quirin Press Revised Edition brings back into print this much sought after title and offers the full original text with the following features: Older Wade-Giles transliteration fully updated and revised to the current Pinyin standard; Fully re-typeset and proofed for typographical errors and inconsistencies...read more