Sensitive Reading
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature and what does it take to enjoy them? This volume explores these questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. The translated selections come from a variety of Indian languages, genres, and periods, from classical to current. They are accompanied by short essays especially...
Narrated in a haunting voice that mulls over painful truths of the past, this is an unflinching, erotic tale of forbidden love in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. Fusang is a Chinese girl who is shanghaied from her village and brought to San Francisco, where she enters a seedy underworld.
Zhongguo Gu Dai Shi Da XI Ju Chuan Qi
by Guangzhou Hu and Jiazhuang Shen
Between 300 and 600 CE, Chinese writers compiled thousands of accounts of the strange and the extraordinary. Some described weird spirits, customs, and flora and fauna in distant lands. Some depicted individuals of unusual spiritual or moral achievement. But most told of ordinary people's encounters with ghosts, demons, or gods; sojourns in the land of the dead; eerily significant dreams; and uncannily accurate premonitions. The selection of such stories presented here provides an alluring intro...
English Heart, Hindi Heartland (Flashpoints, #8) (Flash Points)
by Rashmi Sadana
"English Heart, Hindi Heartland" examines Delhi's postcolonial literary world - its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods - in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Sat...
Chinese Rhyme Prose
The eleventh-century masterpiece The Tale of Genji casts a long shadow across the literary terrain of the Heian period (794-1185). It has dominated critical and popular reception of Heian literary production and become the definitive expression of the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of life in the Heian court.But the brilliance of Genji has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to critical obscurity.Charo B. D'Etcheverry calls for...
Patchwork (East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture, #1)
by Zhongshu Qian
Patchwork: Seven Essays on Art and Literature presents in English translation a number of essays written by the Chinese literary scholar and novelist Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998). One of the great minds of the twentieth century, Qian, with his characteristic erudition and wit, addresses here aspects of the classical literary and artistic traditions of China. Better known, as a scholar, for his magisterial Limited Views: Essays on Ideas & Letters (Guanzhui bian) (1979-80) and, as a novelist, for his...
The Evolution of a Chinese Novel (Harvard-Yenching Institute Studies, #10)
by Richard Gregg Irwin
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (Weatherhead Books on Asia)
by Xiaomei Chen
The first of its kind in English, this anthology translates twenty-two popular Chinese plays published between 1919 and 2000, accompanied by a critical introduction to the historical, cultural, and aesthetic evolution of twentieth-century Chinese spoken drama. Primarily comprising works from the People's Republic of China, though including representative plays from Hong Kong and Taiwan, this collection not only showcases the revolutionary rethinking of Chinese theater and performance that began...
Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater, reframing it as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity in Edo Japan and exploring the process that resulted in its re-creation in Tokyo as a national theatrical tradition. Challenging the prevailing understanding of early modern kabuki as a subversive entertainment and a threat to shogunal authority, Shimazaki argues that kabuki instilled a sense of shared history in the inhabitants of Edo (present-day Tokyo) b...
The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (Translations from the Asian Classics)
Dating back to the eighth century C.E., the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch is a foundational text of Chan/Zen Buddhism that reveals much about the early evolution of Chinese Chan and the ideological origins of Japanese Zen and Korean Son. Purported to be the recorded words of the famed Huineng, who was understood to be the Sixth Patriarch of Chan and the father of all later Chan/Zen Buddhism, the Platform Sutra illuminates fundamental Chan Buddhist principles in an expressive sermon that...
Published in 1917, Light and Dark is unlike any of Natsume Soseki's previous works and unique in Japanese fiction of the period. What distinguishes the novel as "modern" is its remarkable representation of interiority. The protagonists, Tsuda Yoshio, thirty, and his wife O-Nobu, twenty-three, exhibit a gratifying complexity that qualifies them as some of the earliest examples of three-dimensional characters in Japanese fiction. O-Nobu is quick-witted and cunning, a snob and narcissist no less...
Since the 9/11 attacks terror has established its permeating hold on society's psyche. Creative writing, a popular and visible cultural witness to the strain, has taken up this destabilization with remarkable regularity. Troubled Testimonies focuses on the Indian novel in English, deriving inspiration from these disturbances, to essay a unique grasp of the cultural make-up of the times and its reverberations on the sense of self and belonging to the nation. This first full-length study of terror...