Lost Voices of Modernity

Lost Voices of Modernity PDF Author: Denise Gimpel
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824824679
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Lost Voices of Modernity uncovers the story of the most popular and perhaps the most maligned modern Chinese literary journal, Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Short Story Magazine). First published in Shanghai in 1910, Xiaoshuo yuebao boasted a circulation of ten thousand within its first three years of publication. Scholars have long characterized the journal as little more than superficial popular entertainment (primarily action/adventure and love stories) and attributed its early popularity to an urban audience's need for distraction and escape. Now, however, Denise Gimpel's persuasive and effective study reveals a journal of serious appearance and intent. By placing publication, contributions, and contributors within their specific cultural, social, and political contexts, Gimpel provides an astonishingly cogent picture of a reform-through-fiction project created and managed by a dedicated body of writers attempting to address the concerns of the day. Xiaoshuo yuebao informed the growing reading public of national and international issues, science, and foreign lands. Read in context, the stories, essays, plays, and poems published in its pages--largely in the form of the "new fiction" that had been hailed as the sociopolitical cure-all of the early twentieth century--constitute a panorama of the reforms being discussed at the time at all levels of public and private life.

Lost Voices of Modernity

Lost Voices of Modernity PDF Author: Denise Gimpel
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824824679
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lost Voices of Modernity uncovers the story of the most popular and perhaps the most maligned modern Chinese literary journal, Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Short Story Magazine). First published in Shanghai in 1910, Xiaoshuo yuebao boasted a circulation of ten thousand within its first three years of publication. Scholars have long characterized the journal as little more than superficial popular entertainment (primarily action/adventure and love stories) and attributed its early popularity to an urban audience's need for distraction and escape. Now, however, Denise Gimpel's persuasive and effective study reveals a journal of serious appearance and intent. By placing publication, contributions, and contributors within their specific cultural, social, and political contexts, Gimpel provides an astonishingly cogent picture of a reform-through-fiction project created and managed by a dedicated body of writers attempting to address the concerns of the day. Xiaoshuo yuebao informed the growing reading public of national and international issues, science, and foreign lands. Read in context, the stories, essays, plays, and poems published in its pages--largely in the form of the "new fiction" that had been hailed as the sociopolitical cure-all of the early twentieth century--constitute a panorama of the reforms being discussed at the time at all levels of public and private life.

Manhua Modernity

Manhua Modernity PDF Author: John A. Crespi
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520309103
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. From fashion sketches of smartly dressed Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to multipanel drawings of refugee urbanites during the war against Japan, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the early 1950s, the polymorphic cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China's modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated, deeply contextualized analysis of these illustrations across the lively pages of popular pictorial magazines that entertained, informed, and mobilized a nation through a half century of political and cultural transformation. In this compelling media history, John Crespi argues that manhua must be understood in the context of the pictorial magazines that hosted them, and in turn these magazines must be seen as important mediators of the modern urban experience. Even as times changed—from interwar-era consumerism to war-time mobilization to Mao-style propaganda—the art form adapted to stay on the cutting edge of both politics and style.

Work's Intimacy

Work's Intimacy PDF Author: Melissa Gregg
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637469
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.

On the Margins of Modernism

On the Margins of Modernism PDF Author: Christopher Rosenmeier
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474426468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Introduces popular 1940s Chinese authors and explores their influence on Chinese literature Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), but although they were an integral part of the Chinese literary scene their bestselling fiction has been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This groundbreaking book, the first book-lenghth study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other western language, re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. With in-depth analyses of their innovative short stories and novels, Christopher Rosenmeier demonstrates how these important writers incorporated and adapted narrative techniques from Shanghai modernist writers like Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, contesting the view that modernism had little lasting impact in China and firmly positioning these two figures within the literature of their times.Fills a gap in Chinese literary historyFocuses on two of the most popular Chinese authors of the 1940sDevelops a wider argument about the influence of Shanghai modernism on Chinese wartime literature

Chen Hengzhe

Chen Hengzhe PDF Author: Denise Gimpel
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498506933
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
This book takes as its starting point the life, activities, and writings of Chen Hengzhe (1890-1976) in order to investigate the effects of transnational experience and in particular the manner in which different, foreign and Chinese, narratives of life were interwoven into activities and attitudes as well as literary and scholarly output at a time “between orthodoxies” (Jerome Grieder) and of eclectic borrowings in search of change in most areas of national life in China. Chen Hengzhe has been celebrated as China’s first female professor, first professor of Western history, and first person to publish a history of the West that was not a translation into Chinese. She is moreover celebrated as one of the first to write fiction and poetry in the vernacular and to have been the first to write children’s literature. In 1914 she was among the first group of women to gain a Boxer Indemnity grant to study in America. The reiteration of these many “firsts” has led to a rather stereotypical portrait of Chen Hengzhe in Chinese sources and, as a result, in most Western references to her. To date we have no critical study of her work or activities in Chinese or any other language. Chen Hengzhe’s life and textual production, however, deserve and reward closer scholarly attention. They are not only pertinent to analysis of developments in early twentieth-century China; they speak to important questions in China today. This study, then, is not a biography of a person; it is an attempt to understand the way in which foreign influences (narratives of being, organizing, thinking, writing) seep into a person’s life and work and meld with the “home” influences (narratives of being, organizing, thinking, writing) to produce a mix that cannot be predicted by any overarching “isms” or theories.

General Ecology

General Ecology PDF Author: Erich Hörl
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350014710
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Ecology has become one of the most urgent and lively fields in both the humanities and sciences. In a dramatic widening of scope beyond its original concern with the coexistence of living organisms within a natural environment, it is now recognized that there are ecologies of mind, information, sensation, perception, power, participation, media, behavior, belonging, values, the social, the political... a thousand ecologies. This proliferation is not simply a metaphorical extension of the figurative potential of natural ecology: rather, it reflects the thoroughgoing imbrication of natural and technological elements in the constitution of the contemporary environments we inhabit, the rise of a cybernetic natural state, with its corresponding mode of power. Hence this ecology of ecologies initiates and demands that we go beyond the specificity of any particular ecology: a general thinking of ecology which may also constitute an ecological transformation of thought itself is required. In this ambitious and radical new volume of writings, some of the most exciting contemporary thinkers in the field take on the task of revealing and theorizing the extent of the ecologization of existence as the effect of our contemporary sociotechnological condition: together, they bring out the complexity and urgency of the challenge of ecological thought-one we cannot avoid if we want to ask and indeed have a chance of affecting what forms of life, agency, modes of existence, human or otherwise, will participate-and how-in this planet's future.

A Bitter Revolution

A Bitter Revolution PDF Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191579289
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan.

From Woodblocks to the Internet

From Woodblocks to the Internet PDF Author: Cynthia Brokaw
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004185275
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
These essays examine the transformation of Chinese print culture over the past two centuries during which new technologies, intellectual change, and sociopolitical upheavals expanded reading audiences, spawned new genres of print, and reshaped the relationship between publishing and the state.

The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature

The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature PDF Author: Mark Gamsa
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047443276
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
The important place of Russian literature in China is widely acknowledged. To better understand the processes of its translation, transmission and interpretation during the first half of the 20th century, this book draws on an array of Chinese and Russian sources, providing insight into the interplay of political ideologies, cultural trends, commercial forces, and the self-definition of Chinese culture in the period under consideration. By focusing on the translation and translators of three writers, Boris Savinkov, Mikhail Artsybashev and Leonid Andreev, it analyzes the critical fortune in China of the modernist literature written in Russia during the two decades preceding the Great War and Revolution. Offering a thorough study of Lu Xun, the most important Chinese author of the 20th century, as a reader, translator and interpreter of Russian literature, this book also displays the variety of the groups and persons involved in the introduction of foreign literature, going beyond shopworn generalizations about “East” and “West” to make meaningful statements about a complex period in Chinese history.

Selling Happiness

Selling Happiness PDF Author: Ellen Johnston Laing
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824843436
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
From the early twentieth century until the Communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai commercial artists created thousands of colorful posters and black and white advertisements that formed an essential part of modern life in the city. This visually appealing and richly illustrated work describes the origin and evolution of modern commercial art in China, focusing on colorful advertisement calendar posters that featured distinctive feminine images. It makes clear how essential commercial art and its institutional backing were to the development of modern art and even modern society in China over the past century. Selling Happiness discusses not only advertising art but also the production and marketing of the calendar poster. These posters, like other advertisements, were rendered in a Western realistic technique and were wildly and widely popular. Ordinary people throughout China often acquired them to decorate their homes. Laing outlines how the Chinese commercial artist, who rarely attended formal Western art classes, gained skills in Western representational art. In the final chapter of the book, she explains how the styles developed by the commercial poster artists during the 1920s and 1930s became the basis for certain types of propaganda art under the Chinese Communists in the 1950s and 1960s.