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      • Shanghai Century Publishing Group

        Founded in 1999, Shanghai Century Publishing (Group) Co., Ltd. was the first publishing group in China as well as one of the first pilot units for the reform of the national cultural system. The Group is a comprehensive large-scale publishing media group integrating publication of books and journals, digital publishing, copyright trade, import and export of books, printing, art business, and so on. The Group has been taking a statewide leading position in national key publishing projects, becoming one of the enterprises generating most influential publishing culture and providing most influential content in China.

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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2017

        Asia in Western fiction

        by Robin Winks

        Any reader who has ever visited Asia knows that the great bulk of Western-language fiction about Asian cultures turns on stereotypes. This book, a collection of essays, explores the problem of entering Asian societies through Western fiction, since this is the major port of entry for most school children, university students and most adults. In the thirteenth century, serious attempts were made to understand Asian literature for its own sake. Hau Kioou Choaan, a typical Chinese novel, was quite different from the wild and magical pseudo-Oriental tales. European perceptions of the Muslim world are centuries old, originating in medieval Christendom's encounter with Islam in the age of the Crusades. There is explicit and sustained criticism of medieval mores and values in Scott's novels set in the Middle Ages, and this is to be true of much English-language historical fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even mediocre novels take on momentary importance because of the pervasive power of India. The awesome, remote and inaccessible Himalayas inevitably became for Western writers an idealised setting for novels of magic, romance and high adventure, and for travellers' tales that read like fiction. Chinese fictions flourish in many guises. Most contemporary Hong Kong fiction reinforced corrupt mandarins, barbaric punishments and heathens. Of the novels about Japan published after 1945, two may serve to frame a discussion of Japanese behaviour as it could be observed (or imagined) by prisoners of war: Black Fountains and Three Bamboos.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2012

        Narration in nineteenth-century French short fiction

        Prosper Mérimée to Marcel Schwob

        by Peter Cogman

        The short fiction that flourished in nineteenth-century France has attracted relatively little critical attention compared with the novel. This study focuses on some key stories by major authors of contes and nouvelles from the late 1820s to the 1890s, taking as a starting-point, aspects of narrative technique as a way of exploring not just characteristic strategies of short fiction, but also the ends to which they were put: recurrent themes, and the vision of mankind. Each chapter looks in some detail at three or four stories, referring briefly to other tales for illustration. The underlying point that emerges from this study is that the interest of a tale lies in the telling, not the events. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2017

        The Pianoplayers

        by Anthony Burgess

        by Will Carr, Paul Wake, Andrew Biswell

        This novel is one of Anthony Burgess's most accessible and entertaining works. By turns bawdy, raucous, tender and bittersweet, and full of music and songs, this is a warm and affectionate portrait of the working-class Lancashire of the 1920s and 1930s that he knew from his own early life. The Pianoplayers is a funny, moving, autobiographical novel that brings to life the world of silent cinemas and music-halls of 1920s Manchester and Blackpool. Fully annotated and with a new introduction, this is an authoritative text for a new generation of readers. Part of the forthcoming Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, this book offers an opportunity to reappraise an unjustly neglected novel important to our understanding of Burgess's wider oeuvre. The 2017 Burgess centenary makes this a key moment for reflection on the life and work of a major figure in twentieth century letters.

      • Trusted Partner
        Fiction
        September 2017

        A Vision of Battlements

        by Anthony Burgess

        by Andrew Biswell, Paul Wake

        A Vision of Battlements is the first novel by the writer and composer Anthony Burgess, who was born in Manchester in 1917. Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, the book follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an army sergeant and incipient composer who dreams of composing great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war. Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from Virgil's Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce's Ulysses, a comic rewriting of a classical epic, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured. The Irwell Edition is the first publication of Burgess's forgotten masterpiece since 1965. This new edition includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, author of a prize-winning biography of Anthony Burgess.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2013

        Eleventh-century Germany

        The Swabian chronicles

        by I. Robinson

        Three of the most important chronicles of eleventh-century Germany were composed in the south-western duchy of Swabia. The chronicles reveal how between 1049 and 1100 the centripetal attraction of the reform papacy became the dominant fact of intellectual life in German reformed monastic circles. In the abbey of Reichenau Herman 'the Lame' composed a chronicle of the reign of Emperor Henry III (1039-56). His pupil, Berthold of Reichenau, continued his master's work, composing a detailed account of 1076-1079 in Germany. Bernold, a clergyman of Constance, continued the work of Herman and Berthold in a text containing the fullest extant account of 1080-1100. Herman's waning enthusiasm for the monarchy and growing interest in the newly reformed papacy were intensified in Berthold's chronicle, and writing in the new context of the reformed monasteries of south-western Germany, Bernold preached total obedience to the Gregorian papacy. The Swabian chronicles are an indispensable resource to the student of the changing loyalties and conflicts of eleventh-century Germany.

      • Trusted Partner
        Social & cultural history
        July 2012

        Leisure and cultural conflict in twentieth-century Britain

        by Allison Abra, Brad Beaven, Brett Bebber, Kelly Boyd

        This collection of essays addresses research trends in the history of British leisure while also presenting a wide range of articles on cultural conflict and leisure in the twentieth century. It includes innovative research on a number of topics, including television, cinema, the circus, women's leisure, dance, football and drug culture. It provides an excellent entry to leisure studies and history, while addressing the contributions of other disciplines and exploring key historiographical trends. Three broad topics structure the collection; cultural contestation and social conflict in leisure; regulation and standardisation; and national identity embodied in leisure and popular culture. The book will be useful to students and educators of twentieth-century and British history, as it offers accessible and topical studies that pique historical curiosity. In addition, historians, sociologists and cultural analysts of the twentieth century will find it essential for understanding pleasure and recreation in twentieth-century British society.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2016

        Leisure and cultural conflict in twentieth-century Britain

        by Jeffrey Richards, Brett Bebber, Allison Abra, Brad Beaven, Brett Bebber, Kelly Boyd

        This collection of essays addresses research trends in the history of British leisure while also presenting a wide range of articles on cultural conflict and leisure in the twentieth century. It includes innovative research on a number of topics, including television, cinema, the circus, women's leisure, dance, football and drug culture. It provides an excellent entry to leisure studies and history, while addressing the contributions of other disciplines and exploring key historiographical trends. Three broad topics structure the collection; cultural contestation and social conflict in leisure; regulation and standardisation; and national identity embodied in leisure and popular culture. The book will be useful to students and educators of twentieth-century and British history, as it offers accessible and topical studies that pique historical curiosity. In addition, historians, sociologists and cultural analysts of the twentieth century will find it essential for understanding pleasure and recreation in twentieth-century British society. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2020

        Christmas in nineteenth-century England

        by Neil Armstrong

        Whether for reasons of family, food, shopping or religion, it's hard to imagine a British winter without Christmas, or to think of a more traditional national festival. But how and when did Christmas cards, pantomimes and advertising become part of that tradition? This book looks at how people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experienced Christmas and how today's priorities and rituals began and endured. It explores the origins of our deeply held notions around Christmas traditions and demonstrates how those ideas were in fact shaped by the fast-paced modernisation of English life. A fascinating account of the development of many things we now take for granted, the book touches on the history of childhood and the family, philanthropy and work, and the beginnings of consumerism that shaped the Christmas we know today.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2023

        The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction

        by Rob Breton

        Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2011

        Holiday camps in twentieth-century Britain

        Packaging pleasure

        by Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Jeffrey Richards

        This book is the story of two holiday camp chains established in the 1930s that provided thousands with packaged pleasure. Warner and Butlin's commercial camps emerged at the intersection of cultural shifts that politicised working-class leisure and consumption. Entertainment fostered in the post-war camps provided a forum for popular pleasure that reinforced the idea of a 'national' culture grown from the common experience of war. Butlin and Warner, the big commercial chains of the 50s and 60s, are enmeshed in our social and cultural history. Dawson uncovers the significance of the holiday camps to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain, drawing on an impressive variety of sources, from government documents to trade journals, advertising, photographs, oral histories, literature, films and songs. This unique volume will be of interest to academics and specialists of British social history, popular culture and tourism studies whilst remaining accessible to enthusiasts. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Medicine
        November 2024

        Technology, health and the patient consumer in the twentieth century

        by Rachel Elder, Thomas Schlich

        Technology and consumerism are two characteristic phenomena in the history medicine and healthcare, yet the connections between them are rarely explored by scholars. In this edited volume, the authors address this disconnect, noting the ways in which a variety of technologies have shaped patients' roles as consumers since the early twentieth century. Chapters examine key issues, such as the changing nature of patient information and choice, patients' assessment of risk and reward, and matters of patient role and of patient demand as they relate to new and changing technologies. They simultaneously investigate how differences in access to care and in outcomes across various patient groups have been influenced by the advent of new technologies and consumer-based approaches to health. The volume spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spotlights an array of medical technologies and health products, and draws on examples from across the United States and United Kingdom.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2022

        Psychoanalysis and the family in twentieth-century France

        Françoise Dolto and her legacy

        by Richard Bates, David Hopkin, Maire Cross, Jennifer Sessions

        In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if French people had a parenting problem or dilemma there was one person they consulted above all: Françoise Dolto (1908-88). But who was Dolto? How did she achieve a position of such influence? What ideas did she communicate to the French public? This book connects the story of Dolto's rise to two broader histories: the dramatic growth of psychoanalysis in postwar France and the long-running debate over the family and the proper role of women in society. It shows that Dolto's continued reputation in France as a liberal and enlightened educational thinker is at best only partially deserved and that conservative and anti-feminist ideas often underpinned her prominent public interventions. While Dolto retains the status of a national treasure, her career has had far-reaching and sometimes harmful repercussions for French society, particularly in the treatment of autism.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2020

        Spain in the nineteenth century

        New essays on experiences of culture and society

        by Andrew Ginger, Geraldine Lawless

        The nineteenth-century Hispanic world was shattered to its core by war, civil war, and revolution. At the same time, it confronted a new period of European and North-American expansion and development. In these essays, authors explore major, dynamic ways that people in Spain envisaged how they would adapt and change, or simply continue as they were. Each chapter title begins with the words "How to...", and examines the ways in which Spaniards conceived or undertook major activities that shaped their lives. These range from telling the time to being a man. Adaptability, paradox, and inconsistency come to the fore in many of the essays. We find before us a human quest for opportunity and survival in a complex and changing world. This wide-ranging book contains chapters by leading scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2019

        Twenty-first-century fiction

        by Daniel Lea

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2023

        Pasts at play

        Childhood encounters with history in British culture, 1750–1914

        by Rachel Bryant Davies, Barbara Gribling

        This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children's Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children's culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Feeling the strain

        A cultural history of stress in twentieth-century Britain

        by Jill Kirby

        Examining the popular discourse of nerves and stress, this book provides a historical account of how ordinary Britons understood, explained and coped with the pressures and strains of daily life during the twentieth century. It traces the popular, vernacular discourse of stress, illuminating not just how stress was known, but the ways in which that knowledge was produced. Taking a cultural approach, the book focuses on contemporary popular understandings, revealing continuity of ideas about work, mental health, status, gender and individual weakness, as well as the changing socio-economic contexts that enabled stress to become a ubiquitous condition of everyday life by the end of the century. With accounts from sufferers, families and colleagues it also offers insight into self-help literature, the meanings of work and changing dynamics of domestic life, delivering a complementary perspective to medical histories of stress.

      • Trusted Partner
        Biography & True Stories
        January 2021

        Hanif Kureishi

        by Ruvani Ranasinha

      • Trusted Partner

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