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Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

By Bertram D. Ashe, Ilka Saal

From Kara Walker’s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty’s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead’s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele’s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary...

Chinese Funerary Biographies

An Anthology of Remembered Lives

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Ping Yao, Cong Ellen Zhang

Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased’s biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors’...

Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity

By Rivi Handler-Spitz

Symptoms of an Unruly Age compares the writings of Li Zhi (1527–1602) and his late-Ming compatriots to texts composed by their European contemporaries, including Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Emphasizing aesthetic patterns that transcend national boundaries,...

Bhakti and Power

Debating India's Religion of the Heart

By John Stratton Hawley, Christian Lee Novetzke, Swapna Sharma

Bhakti, a term ubiquitous in the religious life of South Asia, has meanings that shift dramatically according to context and sentiment. Sometimes translated as “personal devotion,” bhakti nonetheless implies and fosters public interaction. It is...

Heroines of the Qing

Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories

By Binbin Yang

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...

Republic Café

By David Biespiel

Inspired by Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer’s Baltics and Yehuda Amichai’s Time, Republic Café is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and a tally of...

Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools

The History of Travel Literature in Imperial China

By James M. Hargett

First-hand accounts of travel provide windows into places unknown to the reader, or new ways of seeing familiar places. In Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools, the first book-length treatment in English of Chinese travel literature...

Novel Medicine

Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China

By Andrew Schonebaum

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...

A Queer Love Story

The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout

By Marilyn R. Schuster, Margaret Atwood

A Queer Love Story presents the first fifteen years of letters between Jane Rule – novelist and the first widely recognized “public lesbian” in North America – and Rick Bébout, journalist and editor with the...

Writing the South Seas

Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature

By Brian C. Bernards

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...

Transforming Monkey

Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic

By Hongmei Sun

Able to shape-shift and ride the clouds, wielding a magic cudgel and playing tricks, Sun Wukong (aka Monkey or the Monkey King) first attained superstar status as the protagonist of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to...

Forming the Early Chinese Court

Rituals, Spaces, Roles

By Luke Habberstad

Forming the Early Chinese Court builds on new directions in comparative studies of royal courts in the ancient world to present a pioneering study of early Chinese court culture. Rejecting divides between literary, political, and...

Mobilizing Krishna's World

The Writings of Prince Sāvant Singh of Kishangarh

By Heidi R. M. Pauwels

Savant Singh (1694–1764), the Rajput prince of Kishangarh-Rupnagar, is famous for commissioning beautiful works of miniature painting and composing devotional (bhakti) poetry to Krishna under the nom de plume Nagaridas. After his throne was usurped...

Many Faces of Mulian

The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China

By Rostislav Berezkin

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This genre, a prosimetric narrative in vernacular language,...

On Cold Mountain

A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems

By Paul Rouzer

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...

Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway

By Dean Krouk

Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway illuminates the connections between literature and politics in interwar Europe. Focusing on the works of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Knut Hamsun and modernist poets Asmund Sveen and Rolf Jacobsen, all...

Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan

Commentary on the "Spring and Autumn Annals" Volume 2

By Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, David Schaberg

Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan; sometimes called The Zuo Commentary) is China’s first great work of history. It consists of two interwoven texts - the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu, a terse annalistic record) and a vast...

Reading Orientalism

Said and the Unsaid

By Daniel Martin Varisco. With a new preface by the author

The late Edward Said remains one of the most influential critics and public intellectuals of our time, with lasting contributions to many disciplines. Much of his reputation derives from the phenomenal multidisciplinary influence of his...

The Drunken Man's Talk

Tales from Medieval China

By Luo Ye, Alister D. Inglis

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...

The Scholar and the State

Fiction as Political Discourse in Late Imperial China

By Liangyan Ge

In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power...