- Table View
- List View
The Discovery of Chinese Literature (Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture)
by Laiming YuThis book traces the origin and evolvement of two Chinese characters “wenxue”(literature) by using the methods of conceptual history and historical and cultural semantics, and by taking the evolution and changes of the concept of the these two characters and their interpretations in the west as a window, and re-examining the contemporary morphology of concept evolution in the historical context of concept generation and development to discover the historical and cultural connotations hidden behind the characters, so as to embark on a vivid journey to explore the history of literary thought, discipline and culture. The entire book is woven with the concept of “literature” at its core. Following the author's analysis and interpretation, an interlocking and orderly network of description of ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign unfolds. In this context, the chapters are progressive and mutually responsive, forming an organic whole which is connected at the beginning and the end. For those readers who are trying to understand how Chinese “wenxue” evolved from one of the “four disciplines of Confucius” into a modern discipline and concept, this book will provide the most detailed, in-depth, and vivid historical picture.
Queering Gender, Sexuality, and Becoming-Human in Qing Dynasty Zhiguai: Querying the Strange Tales (Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies)
by Thomas William Whyke Melissa Shani BrownThis book offers queer readings of Chinese Qing Dynasty zhiguai, ‘strange tales’, a genre featuring supernatural characters and events. In a unique approach interweaving Chinese philosophies alongside critical theories, this book explores tales which speak to contemporary debates around identity and power. Depictions of porous boundaries between humans and animals, transformations between genders, diverse sexualities, and contextually unusual masculinities and femininities, lend such tales to queer readings. Unlike previous scholarship on characters as allegorical figures or stories as morality tales, this book draws on queer theory, animal studies, feminism, and Deleuzian philosophy, to explore the ‘strange’ and its potential for social critique. Examining such tales enriches the scope of historic queer world literatures, offering culturally situated stories of relationships, desires, and ways of being, that both speak to and challenge contemporary debates.
English Language Education for Graduate Employability in Vietnam (Global Vietnam: Across Time, Space and Community)
by Tran Le Huu Nghia Ly Thi Tran Mai Tuyet NgoThis open access book examines the teaching and learning of English for employability in Vietnamese higher education. Its content is framed within one country to better examine the research issues within the influence of contextual factors. This book investigates how English can contribute to the development of students' employability capitals, particularly in the aspects of human capital, social capital, cultural capital, identity capital, and psychological capital. It presents employers' and employees’ perspectives of how and why English is increasingly important for career development. This book is a collection of discussions and viewpoints from teachers, students, and other stakeholders like employers, graduates, and course coordinators on current practices and their proposed improvements to prepare students for their future education, work and life. Based on empirical evidence, this book calls for repositioning English language education within the employability agenda to elevate its status and increase stakeholders' engagement. This book contributes to current debates on advancing the effectiveness of English language education in non-English speaking countries, as a response to internationalization and globalization.
Identity, Space, and Everyday Life in Contemporary Northeast China
by Zhen Troy Chen Jiawen Han Xianwen Kuang Xi LiuThis edited volume is first of its kind to document and critically analyse the changes took place snice China’s opening-up and reform and its impact on Dongbei, China’s North-East region, known for its remote and vast landscape, unique and othered culture, rich resources, mighty infrastructures and industries, geopolitical significance. Through presenting up-to-date and multidimensional case studies, the book covers three major aspects of Dongbei, which put people at the heart of our scholarly focus, namely people’s mediated life through traditional and new media; people’s social, cultural, and living spaces; artistic and fictional representations of people’s everyday life.
Abstract Entity Anaphora in Argumentative Texts: Pragmatic Features and Referent Interpretation
by Donghong LiuThis book focuses on abstract entity anaphora in argumentative texts with Asher’s (1993) Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) as the theoretical framework, investigating its pragmatic features and exploring its referent interpretation. The data sources include more than 160,000-word argumentative texts (80,000-word English texts and 80,000-word Chinese ones) selected from newspapers, journals, and books in China and America. At first, a comparative study was done between Chinese and English argumentative texts so as to compare the pragmatic features of abstract entity anaphora in the two languages. Then, referent interpretation is explored within the SDRT framework. Although SDRT can account for most of the instances of abstract entity anaphora, it appears incompetent in dealing with some phenomena in the data of our study. Seven problems in SDRT were found, and corresponding solutions were proposed in an attempt to improve this theory. In general, this book has three aspects of significance. Firstly, it establishes abstract entity anaphora as an independent and a special kind of anaphora. Secondly, the research methods are the combination of empirical study and theoretical hypotheses as well as the coalescent of dynamic study and static study. Thirdly, the book is not limited to the application of SDRT to Mandarin Chinese and backward anaphora. Instead, based on the linguistic phenomena in the data, it challenges and improves the theory, and it even negates some aspects and meanwhile brings forward new solutions.
The Literature and Cultural Ecology of Imperial Examinations in the Ming Dynasty
by Wenxin ChenThe book examines the relationship between imperial examinations and literature from the perspective of restoring the cultural ecology of imperial examinations in Ming China, breaking through the paradigm of pure literature research. This book presents an important practice in adjusting the pattern of literary research. The contents of this book include five mutually independent but supportive parts: 1) the living conditions and careers of the literary attendants; 2) the educational background and school’s consciousness of the Ming literati; 3) top candidates and Ming literature; 4) genres of imperial examination and the Ming society; 5) exam cheating cases from the perspective of politics and literature. This book will appeal to readers interested in Chinese literature and culture and the imperial examination system in ancient China.
Language Practices Among Children and Youth in Indonesia
by Bernadette Kushartanti Dwi Noverini DjenarThis open access book presents studies of language use in Indonesia, focusing on children and youth. It reports on developments in the use of language for narrative production and within the realm of popular culture and traditional cultural practices in Indonesia. Through studies that include cohesion in narrative production, language in radio advertising, naming practices and formulaic prohibitions in Javanese, and speech presentation in popular fiction, the book provides insights into how sociocultural changes are reflected in language. This book is a useful resource for students and scholars conducting research on language and cultural practices in Indonesia, particularly in relation to children and young people.
An MT-Oriented Study of Corresponding Lexical Chunks in Business Correspondences from English to Chinese
by Fumao HuThis book sheds new light on chunk in business correspondence in order to promote the advancement of machine translation. By presenting a bilingual chunk table for correspondence and providing basic theoretical and empirical data on the construction of an MT-based English-Chinese chunk bank for business correspondence, it seeks to improve the accuracy of machine translation systems in a new way. It mainly addresses two questions: (1) How can business English correspondence chunks be defined in machine translation? (2) What are the correspondences between English-Chinese business letter chunks for machine translation? With the aid of a parallel corpus, qualitative and quantitative research methods, and the construction grammar theory, the book puts forward a theoretical model of chunk composition analysis. Further, the findings presented here can be used for the machine translation of English-Chinese business letters, helping to break down communication barriers and promote international business and exchanges.
Fast Politics: Propaganda in the Age of TikTok (The Language of Politics)
by Laura Pérez Rastrilla Pablo Sapag M. Armando Recio GarcíaThe goal of this book is to show the role of TikTok as a tool for political purposes. To this end, the authors analyse the messages posted on this social medium by political figures and institutions such as politicians and political parties, their impact on political landscapes, as well as the transformation of political communication techniques in order to suit the platform’s features. In the last two years, the exponential growth of TikTok has led an increasing number of politicians and institutions to incorporate it into their communication strategies. The platform displays some very different features from other social media that determine the way in which the content is presented. In addition, it manages to reach an audience that normally does not access or share political messages. Within this context, the volume pursues two main objectives. First, to examine how the communication techniques and the peculiarities of this social medium – where short videos with actors in informal attitudes prevail – affect the political message. A second objective is to analyse the influence of the messages distributed through TikTok that redefine political scenarios, and of the relationships of politicians and parties with voters. The core of the book comprises case studies that are organised into three parts, with nine chapters in all. The authors are scholars and practitioners of political communication, with diverse geographical representation, who approach the topics from a range of methodological perspectives. The first part addresses the state of the art and the influence of TikTok features on the way political communication is performed. The second part discusses the influence of TikTok on electoral scenarios and political culture in India, Bangladesh, the United States, and Ecuador. Finally, in the third part, TikTok is analysed as an instrument for promoting far right politicians and parties in Europe, as in the case of MatteoSalvini in Italy, and AfD in Germany and Vox in Spain. The volume is oriented to both scholars and communication professionals, such as journalists, communication consultants, and speechwriters, who want to become familiar with the platform, learn about its political impact, or wish to deepen their understanding of transformations in communication techniques and their adaptation to this growing social medium. Chapter 2 “The Moving Body as the Articulator, Meme and Affective Link in Political Communication on TikTok” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
A Poetics of Minds and Madness: Fiction, Cognition and Interpretation
by XINRAN YANGThis monograph aims to explore the mind-narrative nexus by conducting a cognitive narratological study on the mad minds in fictional narratives. Set on the interface of narrative and cognitive science (cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology), it adopts an indirect empirical approach to the fictional representation of madness. The American writer Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is chosen as the primary text of investigation, whereas due consideration is also given to other madness narratives when necessary. This book not only demonstrates the value of reading and rereading literary classics in the modern era, but also sheds light on the studies of cognitive narratology, cognitive poetics, madness narratives and literature in general.
The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters (Asia-Pacific and Literature in English)
by Simone O’Malley-SuttonThis book examines how the early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance (Irish Literary Revival) inspired the Chinese Renaissance (the May Fourth generation) of writers to make agentic choices and translingual exchanges. It sheds a new light on “May Fourth” and on the Irish Renaissance by establishing that the Irish Literary Revival (1900-1922) provided an alternative decolonizing model of resistance for the Chinese Renaissance to that provided by the western imperial center. The book also argues that Chinese May Fourth intellectuals translated Irish Revivalist plays by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O’Casey and Synge and that Chinese peasants performed these plays throughout China during the 1920s and 1930s as a form of anti-imperial resistance. Yet this literary exchange was not simply going one way, since Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and O’Casey were also influenced by Chinese developments in literature and politics. Therefore this was a reciprocal encounter based on the circulation of Anti-colonial ideals and mutual transformation.
Dutch Interbellum Canons and World Literature A. Roland Holst, M. Nijhoff, J. Slauerhoff (Canon and World Literature)
by Theo D’haenThis text takes a wholly new look at a major early twentieth-century Dutch poet and novelist from the perspective of world literature, situating his work in both a national and a world literary context as measured against contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Conrad, Pound, Brecht, Segalen, and Malraux. Exemplifying how an author from a “minor” literature may be a “major” world author, this book considers the debates within World Literature regarding the classification of literatures as ‘major’ and ‘minor’, canon formation within Dutch literature, Slauerhoff's position in the Dutch tradition as well as well as his contribution to world literature, particularly focusing on his East Asian poems, his East Asian novels and stories and his poetry and prose set in Latin America. This book is a key read for scholars and students of comparative literature, world literature, European literature, and Dutch literature. Lucid in style, innovative in approach, surprisingly fresh qua topic, this book opens new horizons for literary studies.
Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing
by Lee McGowan Kasey SymonsThis edited collection is positioned at the nexus of sports, society and creative writing. In its explorations of the intersections of sports writing, analysis of literary contributions and examinations of craft, it offers rare consideration of a rich diversity of form in narratives that occur in, and as creative practice. Included in the collection are dynamic academic investigations into football writing and poetry focused on community sporting activities in Afghanistan, to those addressing the intersections of writing and boxing in the reflexive reclamation of the post-trauma self, the absence of women in the rodeo and who and what is represented in our sports shelves. This book breaks new ground in approaches to sport’s role in creative writing and what creative writing can provide in furthering our understanding of sport in society. The works in this edited book draw on a diverse range of methods to interrogate the processes, concepts and liminal spaces through an intersectional array of voices, offering analysis and insight into the application of creative writing knowledge and practice in relation to sport and its impact on wider discipline discussion and research. It is relevant to students and scholars studying and researching creative writing, sports writing, sports studies, cultural studies and sports media studies.
Plastic Pasts: Sited Memory in Paris, Algiers and Marseille
by Christopher LefflerThis book uses plasticity as a metaphor for understanding how the past endures and evolves within the landscape, and the ways in which remembering shapes the sites we occupy and use. The plastic site is characterised both by its resilience, its form never entirely altered from an earlier mould, and by its malleability, which ensures that whatever persists is inevitably transformed. Embodied in its present configuration are the many moments that have produced it over time, and these are continually supplemented and modified. Surveying examples from Paris, Algiers and Marseille, and media as diverse as literature, film, photography, blogs and video games, Plastic Pasts interrogates how different communities and cultural producers have grappled with the present past in space as an enduring and dynamic memory. It argues that understanding sited memory as plastic entails recognising a multiplicity of immutable pasts that exist in a permanent state of ongoing evolution.
Concise Reader of Chinese Literature History
by Yuejin LiuThis book includes the history of Chinese literature before 1949. It firstly outlines the development process of Chinese literature and basic features and then discusses them according to the literary genre, for the literature of each era. This book gathers established scholars in the field and presents their latest research in the Chinese literature history studies. Moreover, it has included the literature history of different nationalities in the history of China and the records of folk literature history, reflecting literature from different classes. In the limited space of this book, the writers who have been loved by the Chinese people for three thousand years are discussed, such as Qu Yuan, Tao Yuanming, Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Shi, Xin Qiji, Yuan Haowen, Nalan Xingde, and so on. Careful elaborations are made on each writer together with quotations and analysis of their work.
A Narrative Inquiry into the Experiences of Vietnamese Children and Mothers in Canada: Composing Lives in Transition (Global Vietnam: Across Time, Space and Community)
by Thi Thuy TranThis book recounts the understanding of three Vietnamese children and their mothers’ experiences as they navigate being newcomers to Canada. It explores the cultural, traditional, familial, intergenerational, personal, social, institutional, political, historical, community, and linguistic narratives shaping Vietnamese children and mothers as they compose their lives. The author employs narrative inquiry as a methodological approach, beginning by positioning herself through her narrative beginnings, delving deep into philosophical and methodological underpinnings. The author lays out the three child–mother pairs’ experiences as they negotiated a new culture in Canada, particularly the spaces of home, schools, and communities. The book brings a holistic and relational way of understanding familial curriculum-making as support for children’s school curriculum-making and for the ways in which Vietnamese families’ sustain their ongoing life making. It also looks at the influence of the homeland’s language, culture, and educational traditions. Through the complex interplay between the children and mothers’ narratives and the writer’s own stories, this book discusses multiperspectival and multidimensional ways of supporting Vietnamese newcomers and other ‘arrivals’ composing their lives in similar landscapes. The book is relevant to educators, researchers, cultural brokers, and policymakers, opening avenues for understanding cultural ethics within the relational ethics of narrative inquiry, as well as familial narratives in relation to institutional and social narratives.
Chinese Semiotic Thoughts in the Pre-imperial Age (China Academic Library)
by Dong ZhuThis book examines practices on the relationship between sign and meaning in the Pre-Imperial period of China from the semiotics perspective. Although the Chinese civilization did not develop a comprehensive semiotics system in that period, they are highly semiotic in many ways. The thinking and application of signs of Chinese people can be found in many classics, such as The Book of Changes, The Analects of Confucius, Tao De Jing and Zhuangzi. This book begins its study by re-examining the semiotic thoughts contained in The Book of Changes and inquiries into the thoughts of the major philosophers of different schools. It provides insights into the findings of these philosophers concerning the relationship between sign and meaning. In particular, it concentrates on how the prosperity of the various contending semiotic thoughts complemented each other in forming a sign system. In addition, the book also emphasizes the wholeness and associativity of observing things and studying relevant signs of Chinese people. As the first monograph in any language to systematically summarize Chinese semiotic thought in the Pre-Imperial period, this book helps promote understanding of the traditional Chinese culture and mindset.
The Effects of Personality Hardiness on Interpreting Performance: Implications for Aptitude Testing for Interpreting
by Xing XingThis book sheds new light on personality dispositions research into interpreter performance, injecting fresh impetus for a new research agenda designed to further our understanding of hardiness–performance linkages in interpreters. Interpreters are made not born (Mackintosh, 1999: 67), i.e., it is generally assumed that everyone has the potential to become an interpreter, given proper training. Nonetheless, time constraints and financial limitations make it advisable to select applicants who need the least training. Aptitude testing for interpreting, with a purpose to admitting the most promising candidates, has thus become not only a practical necessity for institutions but also a central issue among interpreting researchers. The book presents a literature review and empirical survey, which reveal, e.g., that aptitude testing for interpreting attaches great importance to cognitive aptitude. In contrast, non-cognitive attributes (personality in particular), while also considered important, are seldom measured, due to their complex structure and the lack of scientific measurement tools. Bearing this gap in mind, the book focuses on research into personality traits in aptitude testing for interpreting, with an aim to expanding the objective means of testing candidates for the requisite knowledge and skills. It is devoted to an empirical investigation into the effects of personality hardiness on interpreting performance, with interpreting anxiety and self-efficacy as two intermediates. To this end, a quantitative method (questionnaire survey) and a qualitative in-depth interview were used with 149 Chinese student interpreters at postgraduate level. The results indicate that personality hardiness is a valuable trait for student interpreters. By systematically presenting the effects of personality hardiness on interpreting performance, the book offers both theoretical and empirical stepping stones to understanding the position of personality hardiness in aptitude testing for interpreting, providing stakeholders with valuable insights into and blueprints for selecting the most teachable candidates for interpreting training programs.
Teaching Chinese Language in the International School Context (Chinese Language Learning Sciences)
by Jia-Fei Hong Chung-Mou SiThis book explores the learning and teaching of K-12 Chinese language in international schools. The authors of this book are scholars from teaching training institutions and universities, as well as professional frontline teachers. With a combination of the works and insights from both perspectives of theory and practice, the book presents how theories of teaching can be operated in classroom to improve the effectiveness of language teaching. It covers curriculum setting, design of teaching materials, teaching principles, methods, strategies, and evaluation. The book also discusses issues and concepts such as concept-driven learning, identity change and recognition of L1 and L2 Chinese teacher, pinyin teaching, Chinese character teaching, evaluation for learning improvement, and integration of South Asian non-Chinese speaking students into local schools. It emphasizes empirical action research methods. This is a highly informative and carefully presented book, providing high value insights to scholars from university and teacher training institutions and teachers from kindergartens, primary, and secondary schools around the world.
Introduction to Pragmatics (Peking University Linguistics Research #9)
by Mingyou Xiang Mian Jia Xiaohui BuThis book covers major topics in the Anglo-American tradition, including deixis, presupposition, implicature, speech acts, and (im)politeness. These key topics are illustrated with examples and case studies from various contexts such as romantic relationships, online forums, social media posts, and popular culture. The book also includes a methods chapter that offers a hands-on guide for literature search, data collection, and data analysis. This book is particularly suitable for readers who have no prior knowledge of pragmatics.
Corpora and Translation Education: Advances and Challenges (New Frontiers in Translation Studies)
by Jun Pan Sara LaviosaThis edited book covers a range of topics related to the use of corpora in translation education, including their standing in corpus-based translation studies, their relationship with machine learning and post-editing, recent advances in learner corpora development and the integration of corpora into translation pedagogy.The book draws the reader into the latest debate on the potential benefits and challenges of using corpora in translation education, as well as serving as practical guidance on how to incorporate corpora into their teaching practice.The book is of particular interest to translation educators, researchers, and postgraduate students who are interested in exploring theoretical underpinnings as well as new ways of teaching and learning translation.
Literary Digital Stylistics in Translation Studies (New Frontiers in Translation Studies)
by Anna Maria CiprianiThis book presents a systematic literary comparison of the retranslations by adopting a mixed-method and bottom-up (inductive) approach by developing an empirical corpus approach. This corpus is specifically tailored to identify and study linguistic and non-linguistic modernist features throughout the texts, such as stream of consciousness-indirect interior monologue and free indirect speech. All occurrences are analysed quantitatively in the computations of inferential and comparative statistics, such as tests of time trends, lexical variety, and lexical frequency. The target texts are digitised, and the resulting text files are then analysed using a bespoke, novel computer program capable of the functions not provided by commercially available software such as WordSmith Tools and WMatrix. This methodology enables in-depth explorations of micro- and macro-textual features and allows a mixed-method approach combining close-reading qualitative analysis with systematic quantitative comparisons. The empirical study of the digital corpus of eleven Italian (re)translations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse identifies a progressive source-text orientation only in a relatively few aspects of a few target texts. The translators’ presence affects all the examined target texts in terms of register and style under the influence of the Italian translation norms usually attributed to the translation of literary classics. Its intended readership comprises students of the mentioned fields and the general public of readers, editors, and publishers.
A Study of Macao Tertiary Students’ Attitudes Towards Language After the Handover (SpringerBriefs in Education)
by Xi YanThis book focuses on the attitudes of Macao tertiary students toward language after the handover. It shares the findings of a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews, which were conducted among freshmen of the University of Macao to investigate their attitudes toward Cantonese, Putonghua, English, and Portuguese, as well as their attitudes toward Macao's language planning and language policy. Utilizing a multidimensional and multilayered perspective in the study, this book also demonstrates the orientations of Macao tertiary students and the correlation between their social categories (gender and social class) and their attitudes toward language.
The Rise of Trans-Eurasian Exchange: Re-visiting the Correlation Between Movement of Chinese Millet and Painted Pottery Before the 2nd Millennium B.C.
by Ting AnThis book has re-visited two distinctive patterns, namely pottery and millet, the movement of both of which conflict with conventional narratives concerning prehistoric trans-Eurasian exchange. The significance of this lies beyond the simple matter of chronology, but rests on the relationship between the movement of agricultural resources and of other items of material culture. Studies on early west–east interaction have attracted researchers from various disciplines, such as archaeology, history, Asian studies, art history, etc. Pursuing an archaeological approach, the book re-examines two of the earliest evidences of trans-Eurasian cultural exchange. The book is intended for researchers who are interested in prehistory, archaeobotany, pottery studies and comparative studies of early civilizations.
(Un)Following in Winnetou’s Footsteps: Representations of North American Indigeneity in Central Europe
by Sanja Runtić Jana Marešová Klára KolinskáThis book examines the ways in which North American Indigenous identity has been (re)imagined, represented, and negotiated in German, Croatian, Italian, Polish, and Czech culture. Employing a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach and drawing on a range of media—from literature, comics, and film to photography, painting, and the performative arts—across different historical and cultural backgrounds, it aims to both contribute innovative scholarship on Indigenous studies in Europe and open a new avenue in the field by focusing on Central European settings that have received little or no critical attention to date. The book’s novelty also comes from its focus on the latest developments in the field, including the “Ravensburger/Winnetou controversy,” which swept across Europe in 2022, echoing the 2017 Canadian debate over Indigenous appropriation and free speech. It seeks to provide a sound reference and lay the groundwork for future scholarship by opening up a conversation on how Indigenous identities have been portrayed in Central European literature and media texts. To this end, it not only addresses generalized expectations about North American Indigenous people underlying (Central) European public discourse and imagination but also questions whether and to what extent some of the ingrained stereotypical views and practices, such as hobbyism, have been challenged in the face of Indigenous resurgence, rapidly changing media and information-sharing realities, and global cultural shifts. The closing interview with Métis playwright, actor, and director Bruce Sinclair underscores one of the book’s key goals—to spark an informed cross-cultural dialogue that will reveal the mechanisms of, as well as the contradictions and tensions inherent in, the politics of Indigenous representation in (Central) European cultural industries and encourage (Central) Europeans to confront their own cultural assumptions and attitudes.