You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
States are inherently and fundamentally geographical. Sovereignty is based on control of territory. This book uses Song China to explain how a pre-industrial regime organized itself spatially in order to exercise authority. On more than a thousand occasions, the Song court founded, abolished, promoted, demoted, and reordered jurisdictions in an attempt to maximize the effectiveness of limited resources in a climate of shifting priorities, to placate competing constituencies, and to address military and economic crises. Spatial transformations in the Song field administration changed the geography of commerce, taxation, revenue accumulation, warfare, foreign relations, and social organization...
In the 1980s China’s politicians, writers, and academics began to raise an increasingly urgent question: why had a Chinese writer never won a Nobel Prize for literature? Promoted to the level of official policy issue and national complex, Nobel anxiety generated articles, conferences, and official delegations to Sweden. Exiled writer Gao Xingjian’s win in 2000 failed to satisfactorily end the matter, and the controversy surrounding the Nobel committee’s choice has continued to simmer. Julia Lovell’s comprehensive study of China’s obsession spans the twentieth century and taps directly into the key themes of modern Chinese culture: national identity, international status, and the re...
Over many centuries, women on the Chinese stage committed suicide in beautiful and pathetic ways just before crossing the border for an interracial marriage. Uncrossing the Borders asks why this theatrical trope has remained so powerful and attractive. The book analyzes how national, cultural, and ethnic borders are inevitably gendered and incite violence against women in the name of the nation. The book surveys two millennia of historical, literary, dramatic texts, and sociopolitical references to reveal that this type of drama was especially popular when China was under foreign rule, such as in the Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu) dynasties, and when Chinese male literati felt desperate about their economic and political future, due to the dysfunctional imperial examination system. Daphne P. Lei covers border-crossing Chinese drama in major theatrical genres such as zaju and chuanqi, regional drama such as jingju (Beijing opera) and yueju (Cantonese opera), and modernized operatic and musical forms of such stories today.
The Ben cao gang mu, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century by a team led by the physician Li Shizhen (1518–1593) on the basis of previously published books and contemporary knowledge, is the largest encyclopedia of natural history in a long tradition of Chinese materia medica works. Its description of almost 1,900 pharmaceutically used natural and man-made substances marks the apex of the development of premodern Chinese pharmaceutical knowledge. The Ben cao gang mu dictionary offers access to this impressive work of 1,600,000 characters. This second book in a three-volume series verifies and localizes all 2,158 geographical and associated administrative names referred to in the Ben cao gang mu in connection with the origin and use of pharmaceutical substances.
Hing Hing Ming reviews some of the major episodes of the Han Dynasty, from its founding by Liu Bang to the Lü Clan Disturbance and subsequent diplomatic overtures and military campaigns against the minor Chinese kingdoms, the Mongols, and Gojoseon (the ancient Korean Kingdom).
When former KGB agent Dimitri Orlov orchestrates an alliance between two world powers bent on domination, he unleashes a powerful chain of events that will rock the Western World. The agenda? Eliminate the President of the United States and seize classified military weaponry capable of shifting the balance of world power. But before this nefarious scheme can reach fruition, Craig Page is on the scene, joined by companion Elizabeth Crowder, ready to confront a painful past and the enemies that helped create it. But can the indomitable Director of Counterterrorism emerge victorious? Finding himself facing an old enemy unexpectedly catapulted into a lethal position of power, Craig is pushed to ...
The bibliography offers information on research about writing and written language over the past 50 years. No comprehensive bibliography on this subject has been published since Sattler's (1935) handbook. With a selection of some 27,500 titles it covers the most important literature in all scientific fields relating to writing. Emphasis has been placed on the interdisciplinary organization of the bibliography, creating many points of common interest for literacy experts, educationalists, psychologists, sociologists, linguists, cultural anthropologists, and historians. The bibliography is organized in such a way as to provide the specialist as well as the researcher in neighboring disciplines with access to the relevant literature on writing in a given field. While necessarily selective, it also offers information on more specialized bibliographies. In addition, an overview of norms and standards concerning 'script and writing' will prove very useful for non-professional readers. It is, therefore, also of interest to the generally interested public as a reference work for the humanities.