The year is 1616. William Shakespeare has just died and the world of the London theatres is mourning his loss. 1616 also saw the death of the famous Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu. Four hundred years on and Shakespeare is now an important meeting place for Anglo-Chinese cultural dialogue in the field of drama studies. In June 2014 (the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth), SOAS, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the National Chung Cheng University of Taiwan gathered 20 scholars together to reflect on the theatrical practice of four hundred years ago and to ask: what does such an exploration mean culturally for us today? This ground-breaking study offers fresh insights into the respective theatrical worlds of Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu and asks how the brave new theatres of 1616 may have a vital role to play in the intercultural dialogue of our own time.

Product Description: Although Lu Xun was a leading intellectual and writer in twentieth century China, and his representative character Ah Q, hero of "The True Story of Ah Q," is considered an iconic repository of progressive Chinese thinking about the national character, few works examine the major discourses in his thought and writing relative to broader historical and intellectual currents outside the context of his politicization...read more

At last here is the long-awaited, first Western-language reference guide focusing exclusively on Chinese literature from ca. 700 B.C.E. to the early seventh century C.E. Alphabetically organized, it contains no less than 1095 entries on major and minor writers, literary forms and "schools," and important Chinese literary terms. In addition to providing authoritative information about each subject, the compilers have taken meticulous care to include detailed, up-to-date bibliographies and source information. The reader will find it a treasure-trove of historical accounts, especially when browsing through the biographies of authors.Indispensable for scholars and students of pre-modern Chinese literature, history, and thought. Part Two contains S to Xi.

Product Description: Another Phenomenology of Humanity: A Reading of A Dream of Red Mansions is devoted to developing another version of phenomenology of humanity—human nature, human dispositions and human desires—by taking A Dream of Red Mansions, the crown jewel of Chinese culture, as its main literary paradigm of illustration...read more

Product Description: The first decade of the 20th century witnessed a calling into question of some of the central positions held by the late 19th century Positivists. There was a shift of paradigm in science as well as art, as elicited by Einstein, William James, Freud, Picasso, Bergson and Pound...read more

Product Description: The Art of War is one of the oldest and most widely read books on tactics and strategy ever written, but it can also be one of the most mystifying for modern readers to tackle. In order to complete this book, author Vincent Gagliano studied several different translations of The Art of War, in addition to books on business, leadership, and military history...read more

Provides an overview of the Constitution, explains the relationship between the three branches of government, and looks at the provisions that protect citizens from the abuses of government

Product Description: This is the first book to bring together nine Asian English writers of Chinese descent from Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong: Catherine Lim, Christine Lim, Ee Tiang Hong, Kee Thuan Chye, Lee Kok Liang, Shirley Lim, Timothy Mo, Xu Xi and Agnes Lam...read more

Product Description: La Wang Chong, Balance des discours (Lunheng) est un recueil d'essais du penseur des Han orientaux, Wang Chong (27-100?). Le but de l'auteur etait de mettre sur la balance les opinions et les murs de son temps pour inciter les hommes a plus de sagesse et de bon sens...read more

In this collection of short stories, Ma Yuan tells enigmatic tales about an eponymous narrator’s travels in Tibet that question the very meaning of “story” and our assumptions about meaning itself. Yang Xiaobin’s introduction explores Ma Yuan’s role as China’s first postmodernist author. Ma Yuan’s stories and novellas develop metafiction in synergy with Tibetan Buddhism’s notion of the cosmos as an illusion.Ma Yuan is of interest for his cloaked allusions to the tortured relationship between Chinese and Tibetans. Where government propaganda portrays the Chinese as the liberators of Tibet, “Vagabond Soul” depicts Chinese economic exploitation of Tibetans―the Chinese narrator bribes a Tibetan beggar to steal rare a rare old Tibetan coin mold for the narrator to mold counterfeits. A Fiction” is a tongue-in-cheek allegory of the Chinese fascination with “primitive” Tibet: a Chinese narrator’s love affair with a nubile Tibetan leper.An aficionado both of western postmodernist fiction and of traditional Chinese Daoism, Ma Yuan portrays the disorienting interaction of traditional Tibetan life and Chinese “modernization” so as to render absurd the rational premises of what we usually call “the modern world.”

This study renders the complex corpus of the Guodian texts into a more easily manageable form, incorporating the past several years of scholarly activity on these texts and providing them with a comprehensive introduction along with a complete and well-annotated translation into English.

Baudelaire's work entered China in the twentieth century amidst political and social upheavals accompanied by a "literary revolution" that called for classical models and modes of expression to be replaced by vernacular language and contemporary content. Chinese writers welcomed their meeting with the West and openly embraced Western literature as providing models in developing their "new" literature. Baudelaire's reception in China provides a representative study of this "meeting of East and west." His work, which has been declared to stand between tradition and modernity, also lies at the intersection between classical and modern literature in China. Many of the best known and most highly regarded writers in twentieth-century China were drawn to Baudelaire's work, and some addressed it directly in their own writings. Bien draws upon H.R. Jauss's theory of the shifting and expanding horizons of expectation in the reading and interpretation of a literary work, and upon James J.Y. Lin's notion of "worlds" received and created by both author and reader, to show how poetic lines, images, and ideas, as well as Chinese critics' comments, eventually weave into a rich picture of Baudelaire's reception in China.

Product Description: Beijing Women presents four short stories: “Lipstick,” “Qipao,” “Ginger,” and “Beijing Women”―stories about how contemporary Chinese women must learn to survive in China’s new market economy, and their inner struggles in a society full of moral ambiguity...read more

Product Description: A value system in constant change; a longing for stability amid uncertainties about the future; a new consciousness about the unlimited challenges and aspirations in modern life: these are themes in modern Chinese literature that attract the attention of overseas readers as well as its domestic audience...read more

Product Description: From unappreciated railway workers facing institutional racism and neglect in the last century to national cultural figures of the present, the Chinese, like other coloured peoples of Canada, have made great inroads into the mainstream, which in turn has adjusted its self-image to accommodate diversity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Although the pictogram-only narrative in Xu Bing's Book from the Ground can be read by anyone, there is much more to the story of Xu Bing's wordless book than can be gleaned from icons alone. This companion volume to Book from the Ground chronicles the entire project, mapping the history of Xu Bing's novel creation from inspiration to exhibition to publication...read more