Böcker i Post-Contemporary Interventions-serien

Suitable for sinologists, literary critics, anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, and others curious about the semiotics of food, this book examines the twentieth-century Chinese political experience as it is represented literature through hunger, cooking, eating, and cannibalising. It includes chapters on Xiao Hong, Wang Anyi, and Li Ang.

Views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models.

Since its publication in Japan ten years ago, the Origins of Modern Japanese Literature has become a landmark book, playing a pivotal role in defining discussions of modernity in that country. Against a history of relative inattention on the part of Western translators to modern Asian critical theory, this first English publication is sure to have a profound effect on current cultural criticism in the West. It is both the boldest critique of modern Japanese literary history to appear in the post-war era and a major theoretical intervention, which calls into question the idea of modernity that informs Western consciousness.In a sweeping reinterpretation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin forces a reconsideration of the very assumptions underlying our concepts of modernity. In his analysis, such familiar terms as origin, modern, literature, and the state reveal themselves to be ideological constructs. Karatani weaves many separate strands into an argument that exposes what has been hidden in both Japanese and Western accounts of the development of modern culture. Among these strands are: the "discovery" of landscape in painting and literature and its relation to the inwardness of individual consciousness; the similar "discovery" in Japanese drama of the naked face as another kind of landscape produced by interiority; the challenge to the dominance of Chinese characters in writing; the emergence of confessional literature as an outgrowth of the repression of sexuality and the body; the conversion of the samurai class to Christianity; the mythologizing of tuberculosis, cancer, and illness in general as a producer of meaning; and the "discovery" of "the child" as an independent category of human being.A work that will be important beyond the confines of literary studies, Karatani''s analysis challenges basic Western presumptions of theoretical centrality and originality and disturbs the binary opposition of the "West" to its so-called "other." Origins of Modern Japanese Literature should be read by all those with an interest in the development of cultural concepts and in the interrelating factors that have determined modernity.

Presents an anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a range of texts - both old and new - that draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist.

Work links dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement to ideas about social order.

Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America. Richard helped to organize the 1987 International Conference on Latin American Women's Literature in Santiago. This work develops some of the key issues brought to the fore during that landmark meeting.

Examining how the limitations of representation have been discussed from Kant up through Marxist theorists of postmodernism, this title illuminates the epistemological, political, aesthetic, ideological, and cultural issues hinging on the inevitable failures of representation.

Writing involves risks - the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, and the risk of inadvertently supporting a reader's prejudices. This title illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps.

An analysis of the Chinese experience of modernity through the literary works, films and other cultural artefacts that represent it.

Romanticism is a worldview that finds expression over a whole range of cultural fields - not only in literature and art but in philosophy, theology, political theory, and social movements. This book formulates a theory that defines romanticism as a cultural protest against modern bourgeois industrial civilization.

Traces German desires to discover, conquer and dominate "new worlds" -- real and imagined-- expressed in stories and literature during the century preceding any actual German colonisation.

Explores the concept of globalization in a variety of cultural settings, and its effect on world-wide cultural transformation of nation, place, race, class, ethnos and gender.

The white man''s burden, darkest Africa, the seduction of the primitive: such phrases were widespread in the language Western empires used to talk about their colonial enterprises. How this language itself served imperial purposes--and how it survives today in writing about the Third World--are the subject of David Spurr''s book, a revealing account of the rhetorical strategies that have defined Western thinking about the non-Western world.Despite historical differences among British, French, and American versions of colonialism, their rhetoric had much in common. The Rhetoric of Empire identifies these shared features—images, figures of speech, and characteristic lines of argument—and explores them in a wide variety of sources. A former correspondent for the United Press International, the author is equally at home with journalism or critical theory, travel writing or official documents, and his discussion is remarkably comprehensive. Ranging from T. E. Lawrence and Isak Dineson to Hemingway and Naipaul, from Time and the New Yorker to the National Geographic and Le Monde, from journalists such as Didion and Sontag to colonial administrators such as Frederick Lugard and Albert Sarraut, this analysis suggests the degree to which certain rhetorical tactics penetrate the popular as well as official colonial and postcolonial discourse. Finally, Spurr considers the question: Can the language itself—and with it, Western forms of interpretation--be freed of the exercise of colonial power? This ambitious book is an answer of sorts. By exposing the rhetoric of empire, Spurr begins to loosen its hold over discourse about—and between—different cultures.

Tracing the development of British cultural Marxism from beginnings in postwar Britain to the emergence of British cultural studies at Birmingham, this book shows this history to reflect a coherent intellectual tradition, one that represents an implicit and explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British Left.

A literary exploration of the prevalence of death--its connection to political oppression and its use as salvation--in Richard Wright's work.

Translated into English for the first time, this work portrays a different side of Hegel -- not just as a philosopher preoccupied with abstract ideas but a man deeply enmeshed and active in the pressing, concrete political issues of his time

Challenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens the way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle.

The term 'subalternity' refers to a condition of subordination brought about by colonisation or other forms of economic, linguistic, and/or cultural dominance. This title examines the relationship between subalternity and representation by analysing the ways in which that relationship has been played out in the domain of Latin American studies.