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Failure, Nationalism, and Literature
How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference.
Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, am...
Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora
What happens when language wars are not about hurling insults or quibbling over meanings, but are waged in the physical sounds and shapes of language itself? Native and foreign speakers, mother tongues and national languages, have jostled for distinction throughout the modern period. The fight for global dominance between the English and Chinese languages opens into historical battles over the control of the medium through standardization, technology, bilingualism, pronunciation, and literature in the Sinophone world. Encounters between global languages, as well as the internal tensions between Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, present a dynamic, interconnected picture of languages on the...
Kingdom of Characters
A riveting, masterfully researched account of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to the modern world, transforming China into a superpower in the process What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language? China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalized, digital world...
Global Chinese Literature
This path-breaking collection of critical essays introduces a diverse range of approaches to open up the field of modern Chinese literature to new cross-regional, local, and global analyses. Each of the ten essays deals with a particular conceptual problem or case study of different locations and modalities of Chinese-language, or Sinophone, production. From language to music, literature to popular culture, minority politics to internal diaspora, theories of sinography to China's quest for the Nobel Prize, this volume brings together leading and new voices in the study of Chinese literature from a variety of comparative and intranational perspectives. Contributors include scholars from Asia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. It is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in contemporary China and the global politics of Sinophone literature. ``This thought-provoking anthology has opened up many fascinating questions. Although its intended readership is scholars from literary studies, anyone who is interested in the interplay between language, ethnicity and identity should not miss it.`` Zhengdao Ye, The Australian National University
Kingdom of Characters
What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to adv...
Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s-1940s
The first of its kind, this collection of critical essays opens up new venues in the comparative study of science and culture by focusing on the formative decades of modern China in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It provides a wide-ranging examination of the cultural and intellectual history of science and technology in modern China.From anti-imperialism to the technology of Chinese writing, the commodification of novelties to the rise of the modern professional scientist, new lexica and appropriations of the past, the contributors map out a transregional and global circuitry of modern knowledge and practical know-how, nationalism and the amalgamation of new social practices. Contributors include: Iwo Amelung, Fa-ti Fan, Shen Guowei, Danian Hu, Joachim Kurtz, Eugenia Lean, Thomas S. Mullaney, Hugh Shapiro, Grace Shen, and Jing Tsu.
Summary of Jing Tsu's Kingdom of Characters
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 Wang Zhao, a Buddhist monk, was wanted for treason by the Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled the Qing dynasty. He wanted to go home, and so he fled to Japan and then Shandong Province in northern China. #2 The Chinese language seemed to be a major impediment to the country’s adaptation. At negotiation tables with foreigners, the Chinese were unable to find easy equivalents for loaded concepts like rights and sovereignty and were seen as barbaric and inferior by their counterparts. #3 The Chinese language was on the verge of a major change, as the old empire was about to be shaken up by decades of internal problems and turbulent encounters with other nations. #4 In 1900, China was in turmoil. An early example of what would come to be known as the Map of National Humiliation began circulating in the late nineteenth century, depicting the different foreign powers as their popular avatars, carving out their share of the country.
Comparatizing Taiwan
As the site of crossings of colonizers, settlers, merchants, and goods, island nations such as Taiwan have seen a rich confluence of cultures, where peoples and languages were either forced to mix or did so voluntarily, due largely to colonial conquest and their crucial role in world economy. Through an examination of socio-cultural phenomena, Comparatizing Taiwan situates Taiwan globally, comparatively, and relationally to bring out the nation’s innate richness. This book examines Taiwan in relation to other islands, cultures, or nations in terms of culture, geography, history, politics, and economy. Comparisons include China, Korea, Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, Ireland, Malaysia, Japan, New...
Different Worlds of Discourse
During the late Qing reform era (1895-1912), women for the first time in Chinese history emerged in public space in collective groups. They assumed new social and educational roles and engaged in intense debates about the place of women in China's present and future. These debates found expression in new media, including periodicals and pictorials, which not only harnessed the power of existing cultural forms but also encouraged experimentation with a variety of new literary genres and styles - works increasingly produced by and for Chinese women. "Different Worlds of Discourse" explores the reform period from three interrelated and comparatively neglected perspectives: the construction of gender roles, the development of literary genres, and the emergence of new forms of print media.
