Although he never left his native Krakow except for relatively short periods, Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869-1907) achieved worldwide fame, both as a painter, and Poland's greatest dramatist of the first half of the twentieth century. Acropolis: the Wawel Plays, brings together four of Wyspianski's most important dramatic works in a new English translation by Charles S. Kraszewski. All of the plays centre on Wawel Hill: the legendary seat of royal and ecclesiastical power in the poet's native city, the ancient capital of Poland. In these plays, Wyspianski explores the foundational myths of his nation: that of the self-sacrificial Wanda, and the struggle between King Boleslaw the Bold and Bishop Stanislaw Szczepanowski. In the eponymous play which brings the cycle to an end, Wyspianski carefully considers the value of myth to a nation without political autonomy, soaring in thought into an apocalyptic vision of the future. Richly illustrated with the poet's artwork, Acropolis: the Wawel Plays also contains Wyspianski's architectural proposal for the renovation of Wawel Hill, and a detailed critical introduction by the translator. In its plaited presentation of Boleslaw the Bold and Skalka, the translation offers, for the first time, the two plays in the unified, composite format that the poet intended, but was prevented from carrying out by his untimely death. Charles S. Kraszewski (b. 1962) is a poet, translator and literary critic. He has published three volumes of original verse: Beast (Alexandria, 2013), Diet of Nails (Boston, 2013) and Chanameed (Atlanta, 2015). Among his critical works is Irresolute Heresiarch: Catholicism, Gnosticism and Paganism in the Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2012); many of his verse translations are collected in the volume Rossetti's Armadillo (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2014). His English translation of Forefathers' Eve by Adam Mickiewicz was published by Glagoslav in 2016. This book has been published with the support of the (c)POLAND Translation Program.

The "Reform Era" (1979-present) in China has been a time of massive social and economic change, and has witnessed China's transition from socialism to capitalism. This book focuses on how this period of change has been constructed in the films of Jia Zhangke through analyzing the five class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur that are found in his films. It examines how the figures' representation and the films' cinematography create what Raymond Williams terms "structures of feeling" feelings that concretize around a particular time and place which are captured and evoked in art and culture. The book argues that Jia's cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social transition and the director's changing attitudes to them through characters of different social classes, but also as an effort to engage the audience's emotional responses to those figures through representation, symbolism, and the affective experience of specific cinematic tropes. While making specific observations on Jia's films, the book adds to the scholarship about the Reform era by considering how this period's enormous transformations have been "felt," and also opens up many new areas, not only in the existing body of literature about Chinese film, which has mainly taken a political or sociological approach, but also in the larger fields of Chinese visual culture, cultural studies, and the affective qualities of film.