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Did East Asian literatures, ranging from bronze inscriptions to zazen treatises, lack a concept of authorship before their integration into classical modernity? The answer depends on how one defines the term author. Starting out with a critical review of recent theories of authorship, this edited volume distinguishes various author functions, which can be distributed among several individuals and need not be integrated into a single source of textual meaning. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literary traditions cover the whole spectrum from 'weak' composite to 'strong' individual forms and concepts of authorship. Divisions on this scale can be equated with gradual differences in the range of self-articulation. Contributors are Roland Altenburger, Alexander Beecroft, Marion Eggert, Simone Müller, Christian Schwermann, and Raji Steineck.
The 2005 bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen's birth is an opportunity to re-evaluate the achievement of one of the great figures of the fairy tale and storytelling tradition, a beloved writer famous for The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and The Red Shoesand many other now classic tales. Jack Zipes broadens our understanding of Andersen by exploring the relation of the Danish writer's work to the development of literature and of the fairy tale in particular. Based on thirty-five years of researching and writing on Andersen, this new book is a welcome reconsideration of Andersen's place and of his reception in English-speaking countries and on film.
For centuries fairy tales have been a powerful mode of passing cultural values onto our children, and for many these stories delight and haunt us from cradle to grave. But how have these stories become so powerful and why? Until now we have lacked a social history of the fairy tale to frame our understanding of the role it plays in our lives. With the publication of When Dreams Came True, Jack Zipes fills this gap and shifts his focus to the social and historical roots of the classical tales. With coverage of the most significant writers and their works in Europe and North America from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, When Dreams Came True is another important...
A much-needed look at the fiction that was actually read by masses of Germans in the late nineteenth century, and the conditions of its publication and reception. The late nineteenth century was a crucial period for the development of German fiction. Political unification and industrialization were accompanied by the rise of a mass market for German literature, and with it the beginnings ofthe German bestseller.Offering escape, romance, or adventure, as well as insights into the modern world, nineteenth-century bestsellers often captured the imagination of readers well into the twentieth century and beyond. However, many have been neglected by scholars. This volume offers new readings of lit...
Thomas Mann's Felix Krull, written between 1910-13 and continued (though never completed) in 1951-54, uses contemporary accounts of these figures as a starting-point from which to explore the aesthetics of society. The early Krull marks an important stage in Mann's development in a number of respects.In writing it, Mann acquired a more flexible conception of identity and a new understanding of the relation between artist and public. Krull also signals a deeper engagement with Goethe and a shift in Mann's work towards a more open treatment of sexuality. The novel presents art as being central to the development of the individual and to social interaction. While Krull is nominally a confidence man, he is more of a performance artist, a purveyor of beauty who relies upon the complicity of his audience. The later Krull takes up where Mann left off and continues the justification of art as an essential human activity. This study draws upon unpublished material in order to provide a comprehensive reading of Felix Krull. It examines the novel within the context of Mann's work as a whole, and, in doing so, it seeks to demonstrate the remarkable continuity of Mann's creative achievement.
The eagerly anticipated final volume of the award-winning, definitive biography of Franz Kafka How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis." Brimming with vivid and often startling ...
The global practice of skin bleaching is predominantly understood as an internalized legacy of colonialism and an embodiment of Western ideals of beauty. This book offers a new perspective on fair skin preference in India: it challenges the assumption that desires for light skin are always a desire of whiteness. Rather than talking back to the colonial centre, skin colour politics reorganise and reinforce social distinctions in Indian societies, which are neither exclusively local nor global. Based on primary research conducted in Delhi, this multi-dimensional study shows how skin colour intersects with and reproduces other categories of social distinction – primarily gender, class, caste, race, region and religion. It historically embeds fairness as an Indian, precolonial yet transnational ideal of beauty. The bleached body emerges as an active and thus, potentially resistant part of negotiating social status within multiple power relations and complex beauty regimes. By mapping a whole geography of skin colours in India, this book shows how fair skin as a locally embedded beauty norm and whiteness as a global cultural imperative interrelate.
This volume is dedicated to one of the founding figures of Israeli Chinese studies, Professor Irene Eber of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It assembles more than two dozen essays by colleagues from all over the world that reflect not only the wide range of her scholarly interests, but above all the fields of research which would not have been established without her and where her contributions will remain. Accordingly, the section "Philosophy in China and Intellectual History" discusses the thorny and complex process of 'organizing the heritage', from the earliest constructed traditions in Han times around the beginning of our era, up to the debates on modernization in present-day China...
This volume features a variety of essays on writing for children, ranging from studies of classic authors to an analysis of the role of pictures in children's books, to an examination of comics and theatre for the young.
Cultural texts born out of migration frequently defy easy categorization as they cross borders, languages, histories, and media in unpredictable ways. Instead of corralling them into identity categories, whether German or otherwise, the essays in this volume, building on the influential work of Leslie A. Adelson, interrogate how to respond to their methodological challenge in innovative ways. Investigating a wide variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that touch upon "things German" in the broadest sense—from print and born-digital literature to essay film, nature drawings, and memorial sites—the contributions employ transnational and multilingual lenses to show how these w...