By examining the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine, Novel Medicine demonstrates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge in China, beginning in the sixteenth century. Critical readings of fictional and medical texts provide a counterpoint to prevailing narratives that focus only on the “literati” aspects of the novel, showing that these texts were not merely read, but were used by a wide ...
Heroines of the Qing introduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary stories. Traditionally, “exemplary women” ( lienu )—heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example—were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian famil ...
Black Women in Sequence takes readers on a search for women of African descent in comics subculture. From the 1971 appearance of the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly” – the first Black female superheroine in a comic book – to contemporary comic books, graphic novels, film, manga, and video gaming, a growing number of Black women are becoming producers, viewers, and subjects of sequential art.As the first detailed investigation of ...
Postcolonial literature about the South Seas, or Nanyang, examines the history of Chinese migration, localization, and interethnic exchange in Southeast Asia, where Sinophone settler cultures evolved independently by adapting to their «New World» and mingling with native cultures. Writing the South Seas explains why Nanyang encounters, neglected by most literary histories, should be considered crucial to the national literatures of China and S ...
In this first serious study of Hanshan (“Cold Mountain”), Paul Rouzer discusses some seventy poems of the iconic Chinese poet who lived sometime during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Hanshan’s poems gained a large readership in English-speaking countries following the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums (1958) and Gary Snyder’s translations (which began to appear that same year), and they have been translated into English more tha ...
This collection of short stories, anecdotes, and poems was likely compiled during the 13th century. Tales of romantic love—including courtship, marriage, and illicit affairs—unify the collection and make it an essential primary source for literary and social history, since official Chinese history sources did not usually discuss family conflict or sexual matters.This volume, the first complete translation of The Drunken Man’s Talk (Xinbian zui ...
In a subtle exposition of the tension between sacred and secular themes in twentieth-century literature, Eugene Webb analyzes works by Yeats, Mann, Rilke, Stevens, Beckett, Joyce, Nietzsche, Eliot, Auden, and Ibsen. He demonstrates the connection between modern literature and religious tradition, and shows how conceptions of the sacred and its relation to the secular have been transformed in modern literary imagery.Webb considers the writers he ...
Philosophers of Consciousness is both an expository study of the thought of the six figures it focuses on and an original exploration of the themes they address. In addition, as Eugene Webb states, «it does not hesitate to probe the more problematic areas of the thought of each thinker and to suggest what to some of their advocates will probably seem rather bold and controversial interpreations of their ideas.»The book reveals some deep differen ...
Collectively the works of Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, reveal a remarkable continuity of theme. Together his writings present a particular view of life and each novel constitutes part of a larger whole. ...
