This book introduces readers to the historical, performative, and cultural context of pansori, a traditional Korean oral story-singing art.Written by a scholar-practitioner of the form, this study is structured in three parts and begins by introducing readers to the technical, aesthetic, and theoretical components of pansori, as well as the synthesis of vocal and percussive elements that stage the narrative. It moves on to reflect on the historical contexts of pans...

At the core of Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation is a fascinating paradox: the martial arts film, long regarded as a vehicle of Chinese cultural nationalism, can also be understood as a mass cultural expression of Hong Kong’s modern urban-industrial society. This important and popular genre, Man-Fung Yip argues, articulates the experiential qualities, the competing social subjectivities and gender discourses, as well as the heightened circ...

With over forty original essays, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures offers an in-depth engagement with the current analytical methodologies and critical practices that are shaping the field in the twenty-first century. Divided into three sections--Structure, Taxonomy, and Methodology--the volume carefully moves across approaches, genres, and forms to address a rich range topics that include popular culture in Late Qing China, Zhang Guangyu's Journey to the West ...

This sourcebook contains more than 160 documents and writings that reflect the development of Taiwanese literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Selections include seminal essays in literary debates, polemics, and other landmark events; interviews, diaries, and letters by major authors; critical and retrospective essays by influential writers, editors, and scholars; transcripts of historical speeches and conferences; literary-society manifestos and inaugural jou...

Martial Sound examines the performance and function of music in the martial arts traditions of Chinese Canadians. Author Colin P. McGuire's novel theory of martial sound identifies the ways in which one can hear music as martial arts and listen to hand combat as musicking. In doing so, McGuire both outlines how to discuss fighting rhythms in musical terms and provides a conceptual framework for analyzing how music can function as a form of self-defence. Throughout, McGuire closely...

Li and his contributors explore how Taiwanese poets conceptualize their identities, employing multiple voices to challenge political hegemony and re-evaluate Taiwan’s colonial legacy and nationalism.Poetry in Taiwan exists at the intersection of Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Japanese languages and traditions. The rise of China has contributed to the shrinking of Taiwan’s international space, leading to Taiwanese cultures often being viewed as tributaries or by-products of China on the g...

In the West, Stephen Chow is renowned as the ground-breaking director and star of global blockbusters such as Kung Fu Hustle (2004) and Shaolin Soccer (2001). Among Hong Kong audiences, Chow is celebrated as the leading purveyor of local comedy, popularising the so-called mo-lei-tau (“gibberish”) brand of Cantonese vernacular humour, and cultivating a style of madcap comedy that often masks a trenchant social commentary.This volume approaches Chow from a diverse r...

Taiwan is in danger of becoming the last isle, losing its sovereignty and identity. The Last Isle opens from where Taiwan film scholarship leaves off—the 1980s Taiwan New Cinema, focusing on relatively unknown contemporary films that are “unglobalizable,” such as Cape No. 7, Island Etude, Din Tao, and Seven Days in Heaven. It explores Taiwan films’ inextricability with trauma theory, the irony of loving and mourning Taiwan, multilingualism, local beliefs, and theatrical practices, includin...

The madang is a key space and concept for Korean drummers and dancers. Literally a village circle, the madang is also a metaphor for an expressive occasion or cultural space of embodied participation. Korean performers step in the madang as a means of bringing their bodies into purposeful contact with the particular time and place of performance. Kwon contends that the participatory way of being that is cultivated in the madang counteracts the fossilization of tradition by bringing folk pr...

The present book features some introductory discussions on martial arts for the international audience and highlights in brief the complexities of translating the genre into English, often from a comparative literature perspective. Martial arts, also known as Kungfu or Wushu, refer to different families of Chinese fighting styles over many centuries. Martial arts fiction, or Wuxia literature, is a unique genre that depicts adventures of martial artists in ancient China. Understanding marti...

Spaces of Possibility, which arose from a 2012 conference held at the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities, engages with spaces in, between, and beyond the national borders of Japan and Korea. Some of these spaces involve the ambiguous longings and aesthetic refigurings of the past in the present, the social possibilities that emerge out of the seemingly impossible new spaces of development, the opportunities of genre, and spaces of new ethical subjectiviti...

Providing a broad introduction to the area, A World History of Chinese Literature maps the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds, looking both within – at the world of Chinese literature, its history, linguistic, cultural, local, and regional specificities – and without – at the way Chinese literature has circulated throughout the world. The thematic focus allows for a broad number of key categories, such as authors, genres, genders, regions, as well as innovative ...