Iovene reexamines the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture during the Maoist and post-Mao era, from the 1950s to 2011. She mines a wide range of Chinese literary works, encompassing avantgarde and science fiction, popular science magazines…
"This book investigates how the Chinese have coped with the condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrust together. Haiyan Lee dismisses the easy answers claiming that this 'moral crisis' is merely smoke and mirrors conjured up by paternalistic, overwrought lead…
It may be time to forget the art world - or at least to recognize that a certain historical notion of the art world is in eclipse. Today, the art world spins on its axis so quickly that its maps can no longer be read; its borders blur. In Forgetting the Art World, Pamela Lee con…
"Renowned political economist Samir Amin, engaged in a unique lifelong effort both to narrate and affect the human condition on a global scale, brings his analysis up to the present--the world of 2013. The key events of our times--financial crisis, the emerging nations, globaliz…
Sounding the Color Line explores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds…
Until its rejection by reformers and revolutionaries in the twentieth century, Confucianism had been central to Chinese culture, identity, and thought for centuries. Confucianism was rejected by both Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong's Communist Party, which char…
The so-called 'Cedar Revolution' in Lebanon, triggered by the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005, brought to an end three decades of Syrian military presence in the country. Here, Taku Osoegawa challenges the commonly-held claim that Lebanon…
"While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, …
"What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T.S. Eliot to J.M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone lit…
Slavoj Žižek and Srećko Horvat combine their critical clout to emphasize the dangers of ignoring Europe's growing wealth gap and the parallel rise in right-wing nationalism, which is directly tied to the fallout from the ongoing financial crisis and its prescription of imposed a…
In 2393, a historian of the Second People's Republic of China reviews the "Penumbral Age" (1988-2093), when politicians, corporations, and scientists ignored the statistical significance of climate disaster. Carbon dioxide warming the planet, deadly summer heat and fires, and th…
"While recent studies in neuroscience and psychology have shed light on our sensory and perceptual responses to art, they have yet to explain our responses to contemporary art which downplays perceptual responses and instead encourages conceptual thought. The Psychology of Conte…
The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-first Century is an illustrated collection of commissioned essays that attempt to anticipate, through current artistic productions, the aesthetic sensibility that will define our times.
"Keeping his focus on America, Nathaniel Comfort introduces the community of scientists, physicians, and public health workers who have contributed to the development of medical genetics from the nineteenth century to today. He argues that medical genetics is closely related to …
