Qian Qianyi's Reflections on Yellow Mountain is a close examination of the practice of travel writing in seventeenth-century China, presenting a new reading of the youji genre that combines meticulous research and an innovative theoretical position.

In this book, Huaichuan Mou takes a fresh look at the life, times, and work of Wen Tingyun, the great poet of the late Tang dynasty in China, whose reputation has been overshadowed by notoriety and misunderstanding for more than a thousand years. In probing the political intricacies of the major events of Wen’s life and the complex contexts in which these events took place, Mou presents a historical key to Wen’s artistic labyrinth, unraveling many of Wen’s poetic puzzles and rediscovering a historical past that vividly represents his unyielding pursuit of ideal government and true love. This reconstruction of the poet’s life results in a new understanding not only of his literary work but also of late Tang history as well. Translations and close readings of a number of poems and prose essays are included.

Can the subaltern joke? Christi A. Merrill answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden-whether spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or the uncertain legacies of a divinely wrought sex change. Herself a skilled translator, Merrill uses these examples to investigate the expectation that translated work should allow the non-English-speaking subaltern to speak directly to the English-speaking reader. She plays with the trope of speaking to argue against treating a translated text as property, as a singular material object to be carried across(as trans-latus implies.) She refigures translation as a performative telling in turn,from the Hindi word anuvad, to explain how a text might be multiply possessed. She thereby challenges the distinction between originaland derivative,fundamental to nationalist and literary discourse, humoring our melancholic fixation on what is lost. Instead, she offers strategies for playing along with the subversive wit found in translated texts. Sly jokes and spirited double entendres, she suggests, require equally spirited double hearings.The playful lessons offered by these narratives provide insight into the networks of transnational relations connecting us across a sea of differences. Generations of multilingual audiences in India have been navigating this Ocean of the Stream of Storiessince before the 11th century, arriving at a fluid sense of commonality across languages. Salman Rushdie is not the first to pose crucial questions of belonging by telling a version of this narrative: the work of non-English-language writers like Vijay Dan Detha, whose tales are at the core of this book, asks what responsibilities we have to make the rights and wrongs of these fictions come alive age after age.

Set in 1950s Hong Kong, The Road paints an evocative picture of comfortable colonial life, while at the same time presenting the local people with the shrewd understanding that the author had acquired as District Offi cer in rural Hong Kong.

The Scent of the Gods tells the enchanting, haunting story of a young girl's coming of age in Singapore during the tumultuous years of its formation as a nation. Eleven-year-old Su Yen bears witness to the secretive lives of "grown-ups" in her diasporic Chinese family and to the veiled threats in Southeast Asia during the Cold War years. From a child's limited perspective, the novel depicts the emerging awareness of sexuality in both its beauty and its consequences, especially for women. In the context of postcolonial politics, Fiona Cheong skillfully parallels the uncertainties of adolescence with the growing paranoia of a population kept on alert to communist infiltration. In luminous prose, the novel raises timely questions about safety, protection, and democracy--and what one has to give up to achieve them._x000B__x000B_Ideal for students and scholars of Asian American and transnational literature, postcolonial history, women's studies, and many other interconnected disciplines, this special edition of The Scent of the Gods includes a contextualizing introduction, a chronology of historical events covered in the novel, and explanatory notes.

The first book-length study in English of the Chinese classic, the Li sao (Encountering Sorrow). Includes translations of Li sao and the Nine Songs. The Li sao (also known as Encountering Sorrow), attributed to the poet-statesman Qu Yuan (4th–3rd century BCE), is one of cornerstones of the Chinese poetic tradition. It has long been studied as China’s first extended allegory in poetic form, yet most scholars agree that there is very little in the two-thousand-year-old tradition of commentary on it that convincingly explains its supernatural flights, its complex floral imagery, or the gender ambiguity of its primary poetic persona. The Shaman and the Heresiarch is the first book-length study of the Li sao in English, offering new translations of both the Li sao and the Nine Songs. The book traces the shortcomings of the earliest extant commentary on those texts, that of Wang Yi, back to the quasi-divinatory methods of the highly politicized tradition of Chinese classical hermeneutics in general, and the political machinations of a Han dynasty empress dowager in particular. It also offers an entirely new interpretation of the Li sao, one based not on Qu Yuan hagiography but on what late Warring States period artifacts and texts, including recently unearthed texts, teach us about the cultural context that produced the poem. In that light we see in the Li sao not only a reflection of the era of the great classical Chinese philosophers, but also the breakdown of the political-religious order of the ancient state of Chu.

As medieval Chinese manuscripts were copied and recopied through the centuries, both mistakes and deliberate editorial changes were introduced. Xiaofei Tian shows how readers not only experience authors but "produce" them by shaping texts to their interpretation, focusing on the evolution over the centuries of the reclusive poet Tao Yuanming into a figure of epic stature.