MCLC: New Cambria publications

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New Cambria publications
Cambria Press is pleased to announce the publication of Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics edited by Mabel Lee and Liu Jianmei. This volume brings readers up to date on the many works of Gao Xingjian. By looking at the extensive reach of Gao Xingjian’s transcultural, transdisciplinary, and transmedia explorations, this book provides readers with a panoramic examination of Gao’s works as playwright, novelist, poet, painter, and philosopher.
Cambria Press is pleased to announce the publication of Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung by Carolyn T. Brown. Most studies on Lu Xun’s modern short stories have usually focused on the content and used the stories to understand Lu Xun the writer or to shed light on his times; they have attended to the structure to the degree that it illuminates these concerns. This study executes a reversal, decentering the content and focusing on the structure as a primary means to understand the texts, and it seeks to understand the Lu Xun who presents himself through his work, not Lu Xun the full human being. The structure that emerges from a close reading of the stories does indeed present an implicit therapeutic model. Carl Jung’s theories of the normative human self articulate with some precision Lu Xun’s implicit vision of spiritual cure. Jung, one of three key founders of modern Western psychology, grounded his understanding of the human psyche in personal self-scrutiny and extensive clinical practice, and so his theories offer a validated psychological model for interpreting the textual evidence. Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung thus deploys a new methodology and proposes a new model for interpreting Lu Xun’s collections of modern short stories. This study demonstrates that Lu Xun had a clear but implicit model of spiritual healing and cure. He began with the assumption that this psycho-dynamic paradigm might apply in all arenas of Chinese life and so tested out this premise imaginatively through his stories.
Cambria Press, in collaboration with Taipei Chinese PEN, is pleased to announce for the publication of Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology edited by Jonathan Stalling, Lin Tai-man, and Yanwing Leung.  With this first English-language anthology of contemporary Taiwanese women writers in decades, readers are finally provided with a window to the widest possible range of voices, styles, and textures of contemporary Taiwanese women writers. Each story unfolds and takes readers through fascinating narratives spanning adolescence, marriage, and motherhood as well as sex, politics and economics on many different scales—some appear as snapshots of lives in transition, others reveal whole lives as time-lapse images across decades, while a few implode into the stillness of a single bottomless moment. Individually each story expresses its own varied, expansively heterogeneous narrative; when read as a whole collection, readers will discover a pointedly gendered exploration of modern Taiwan. The quality and diversity of the stories in this anthology are representative of the work produced by the Taipei Chinese PEN, which curates, translates, and publishes the best Chinese Literature from Taiwan since its founding 1972.
Cambria Press is pleased to announce the publication of Chinese Women Writers and Modern Print Culture by Megan M. Ferry. The widespread public exposure of modern Chinese women writers in the 1920s and 1930s generated interest in women’s creative output. The publishing field was the chief cultural forum within which other women looking for role models assessed their experiences in modernity. At the same time, however, this forum was limited by parameters that defined the labor of “women writers” (nüzuojia) as largely sentimental, unstructured, politically disengaged or naively subjective and unable to see the “larger picture” of humanity. Therefore, the value of women’s creative output was classified alongside the dominant narrative that conditioned readers’ responses to women’s literary output as evidence of women’s incomplete emancipation. The liberation of the newly styled women occurred in an industry whose power was the basis of the nation’s new cultural construction, yet despite there being exemplary women within the industry, there is no evidence of women as drivers of culture or in sustained cultural leadership roles to the same extent or with the same cultural weight as their male peers.
Women intellectual’s status as cultural producers, as it was codified in print media, has yet to be more fully explored so that we can better understand the relationship between gender ideologies and media. By deconstructing the hidden visual and linguistic signs of modernity’s promise for women’s equality and freedom one can begin to understand why, a century later, contemporary female authors confront obstacles similar to their pre-1949 predecessors. The social category of “women writers” is one among many that lets us examine how media’s visual and linguistic signs of difference express cultural identity norms and codify the modern individual. This is the first study to analyze the gendered ideologies of Chinese print media and political culture in a single work. It employs media analysis to examine the way paratexts create and reproduce gendered norms, especially through persistent material and discursive mechanisms that framed women authors and their textual production. Though a plethora of women’s voices resonated throughout the literary publications, journals, and newspapers, these voices were framed by print media’s apparatus that marked women as belonging to a sphere of difference. This marked difference highlights a contradictory outcome of women’s emancipation and gender equality.
Cambria Press is pleased to announce the publication of Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Chinese Celebrities by Wen Yuan-ning and Others, edited by Christopher Rea.
Wen Yuan-ning (1900–1984) was both an insider and an outsider on the politics of celebrity in modern China. Born into a Hakka family in the Dutch East Indies, he studied law at Cambridge University before moving to China to embark on a remarkably varied career. He taught English literature at China’s top universities, including Peking and Tsinghua, contributed to leading English-language periodicals such as The China Critic and T’ien Hsia Monthly, served in China’s legislature in Nanking, worked as a wartime propagandist in Hong Kong, and eventually was appointed as China’s ambassador to Greece.
During the heady days of Anglophone publishing in 1930s China, Wen Yuan-ning edited for The China Critic a series of “Unedited Biographies” (later “Intimate Portraits”) of famous contemporary Chinese personages. Wen and his collaborators—some of whom wrote anonymously—offered readers mischievous and idiosyncratic accounts of the careers and personalities of the people in the news. These celebrity sketches proved both controversial and popular, with several of them immediately being translated into Chinese. A selection of seventeen of Wen’s own contributions to The China Critic series was published to acclaim in 1935 as the book Imperfect Understanding. Yet Wen and his contributions to Chinese literary culture disappeared from the historical record after the founding of the People’s Republic, likely because Wen wrote in English and had close ties to the Chinese Nationalist Party.
What did it mean to be a celebrity in 1930s China? Who were Republican China’s preeminent intellectuals, writers, artists, politicians, diplomats, and businesspeople, and how were they represented in the popular press? This anthology brings together fifty rediscovered essays, written in English in 1934, which offer fascinating, close-up profiles of a constellation of celebrities. From the warlord Han Fuju to the Peking Opera star Mei Lanfang to the intellectual leader Hu Shi to the novelist Lao She to ambassador Wellington Koo to the Singaporean Chinese entrepreneur Lim Boon Keng to the deposed Qing Emperor Puyi, the series presents a panorama of Chinese elites. Imperfect Understanding constitutes a significant archival discovery, a unique artifact of the pre-war heyday of Anglophone literary culture in China.
Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Chinese Celebrities is both an entertaining work of literature, by turns comedic and touching, and an important historical document. Its sketches represent influential Chinese historical figures, warts and all, in the eyes of contemporary observers seeking to provide readers an alternative to the autobiographical puffery of popular books like Who’s Who in China. Christopher Rea’s introduction offers new research on the forgotten literary figure Wen Yuan-ning and argues that one of the essays published under his name was written anonymously by a young man who went on to become one of modern China’s literary giants: Qian Zhongshu. This edition of Imperfect Understanding also includes multiple reviews of Wen’s book, brief biographies of the subjects of the Critic series, and a bibliography of further writings by and on Wen Yuan-ning.
Posted by: Ben Goodman <bgoodman at cambriapress.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on March 19, 2018
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