"The one hundred-some stories depict the important role ghosts played in the lives of the Chinese, as well as revealing a great deal about sex, revenge, transvestism, corruption, and other topics banned by Mei's puritanical mid-Qing society". -- Reference & Research Book News.

The Encyclopedia, the first of its kind, introduces Confucianism as a whole, with 1,235 entries giving full information on its history, doctrines, schools, rituals, sacred places and terminology, and on the adaptation, transformation and new thinking taking place in China and other Eastern Asian countries. An indispensable source for further study and research for students and scholars.

An innovative text which adopts the tools of cultural studies to provide a fresh approach to the study of Chinese language, culture and society. The book tackles areas such as grammar, language, gender, popular culture, film and the Chinese diaspora and employs the concepts of social semiotics to extend the ideas of language and reading. Covering a range of cultural texts, it will help to break down the boundaries around the ideas and identities of East and West and provide a more relevant analysis of the Chinese and China.

Citizens of the World investigates an area of eighteenth-century cultural, intellectual, and day-to-day life that many have seen but few have explored: adaptation. Throughout the long eighteenth century, adaptation happened repeatedly and in diverse forms: in the experience of travelers, merchants, and expatriates who made their way in foreign lands; in the adjustment of ancient literary norms to modern themes, concerns, and expectations; in the development of scientific apparatus for the probing of newly-discovered phenomena; in translating; in the adjusting of familiar architecture for new environments; in speculating about and making provision for the future reception of contemporary works; in the tempering and symphonizing of musical instruments; and in dozens of other no less important ways. The eight essays in this book, composed by scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America, provide the first panoramic view of adaptation during the Enlightenment. Essays delve into such diverse forms of adaptation as the representation of cultural interchange on porcelain serving pieces; the attempt to come to terms with the demands of air travel through the often cumbersome technology of ballooning; the relevance of the English Enlightenment to present-day Caribbean literature; piracy as a form of recalibration; Vietnamese verse; Georgic envisioning of ecological stability; and the uncanny interactions of French provincial architecture with both eighteenth-century dwellers and their descendants. Cumulatively, the essays illuminate the process by which eighteenth-century thinkers, artists, and adventurers elevated adaptation from a mere necessity to a stimulating, happily unending cultural project.

History and Wonder is a refreshing new take on the idea of history that tracks the entanglement of history and philosophy over time through the key idea of wonder. From Ancient Greek histories and wonder works, to Islamic curiosities and Chinese strange histories, through to European historical cabinets of curiosity and on to histories that grapple with the horrors of the Holocaust, Marnie Hughes-Warrington unpacks the ways in which historians throughout the ages have tried to make sense of the world, and to change it. This book considers histories and historians across time and space, including the Ancient Greek historian Polybius, the medieval texts by historians such as Bede in England and Ibn Khaldun in Islamic Historiography, and the more recent works by Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray and Ranajit Guha among others. It explores the different ways in which historians have called upon wonder to cross boundaries between the past and the present, the universal and the particular, the old and the new, and the ordinary and the extraordinary. Promising to both delight and unsettle, it shows how wonder works as the beginning of historiography. Accessible, engaging and wide-ranging, History as Wonder provides an original addition to the field of historiography that is ideal for those both new to and familiar with the study of history.

Thinking Through Confucius critically interprets the conceptual structure underlying Confucius' philosophical reflections. It also investigates "thinking," or "philosophy" from the perspective of Confucius. That authors suggest that an examination of Chinese philosophy may provide an alternative definition of philosophy that can be used to address some of the pressing issues of the Western cultural tradition.