The complex interweaving of different Western visions of China had a profound impact on artistic exchange between China and the West during the nineteenth century. Beyond Chinoiserie addresses the complexity of this exchange. While the playful Western "vision of Cathay" formed in the previous century continued to thrive, a more realistic vision of China was increasingly formed through travel accounts, paintings, watercolors, prints, book illustrations, and photographs. Simultaneously, the new discipline of sinology led to a deepening of the understanding of Chinese cultural history. Leading and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, literary studies and material culture, have authored the ten essays in this book, which deal with artistic relations between China and the West at a time when Western powers' attempts to extend a sphere of influence in China led to increasingly hostile political interactions.

At least 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy. Representing Epilepsy, the latest volume in LUP's acclaimed Representations series, seeks to understand the epileptic body as a literary or figurative device intelligible beyond a medical framework. Jeannette Stirling argues that neurological discourse from the late-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century is as much forged by the cultural conditions and representational politics of the times as it is by the science of western medicine. Along the way she explores narratives of epilepsy depicting ideas of social disorder, tainted bloodlines, sexual deviance, spiritualism and criminality in works as diverse as David Copperfield and The X Files. This path-breaking book will be required reading for cultural disability studies scholars and for anyone seeking greater understanding of this common condition. 'Representing Epilepsy offers a clever exploration of the cultural history of this condition, based on an effective interdisciplinary approach. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the field of Medical Humanities, as well as to all those involved in the care of people with epilepsy, who wish to improve their understanding of the socio-cultural repercussions of the condition.' Maria Vaccarella, King's College London

There are many avenues for displaying political agendas, with a prominent one being literature. Through literature, the voices of political parties and ideals can enlighten those in the present, and can even be preserved for centuries to come. Ideological Messaging and the Role of Political Literature provides a detailed study of how contemporary political messages are portrayed and interpreted via the written word. Featuring relevant coverage on topics such as literary production, women in politics, identity, and travel politics, this publication is an in-depth analysis that is suitable for academicians, students, professionals, and researchers that are interested in discovering more about political messages and their effects on society.

Throughout the early modern period, the nymph remained a powerful figure that inspired and informed the cultural imagination in many different ways. Far from being merely a symbol of the classical legacy, the nymph was invested with a surprisingly broad range of meanings. Working on the basis of these assumptions, and thus challenging Aby Warburg's famous reflections on the nympha that both portrayed her as cultural archetype and reduced her to a marginal figure, the contributions in this volume seek to uncover the multifarious roles played by nymphs in literature, drama, music, the visual arts, garden architecture, and indeed intellectual culture tout court, and thereby explore the true significance of this well-known figure for the early modern age. Contributors: Barbara Baert, Mira Becker-Sawatzky, Agata Anna Chrzanowska, Karl Enenkel, Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Michaela Kaufmann, Andreas Keller, Eva-Bettina Krems, Damaris Leimgruber, Tobias Leuker, Christian Peters, Christoph Pieper, Bernd Roling, and Anita Traninger.

In The Pragmatist Turn, renowned scholar of American literature and thought Giles Gunn offers a new critical history of the way seventeenth-century religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment influenced the formation of subsequent American writing. This shaping was dependent on their pragmatic refiguration less as systems of belief and thought than as frames of reflection and structures of feeling, what he calls spiritual imaginaries.Drawing on a large number of figures from earlier periods and examining how they influenced generations of writers from the nineteenth century into the early twenty-first -including Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, William James, Henry James, Kenneth Burke, and Toni Morrison-Gunn reveals how the idea or symbolic imaginary of ""America"" itself was drastically altered in the process. As only a seasoned scholar can, Gunn here presents the history of American religion and literature in broad strokes necessary to reveal the seismic philosophical shifts that helped form the American canon.

How well do we really know Pearl S. Buck? Many think of Buck solely as the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Good Earth, the novel that explained China to Americans in the 1930s. But Buck was more than a novelist and interpreter of China. As the essays in Beyond The Good Earth show, she possessed other passions and projects, some of which are just now coming into focus. Who knew, for example, that Buck imagined and helped define multiculturalism long before it became a widely known concept? Or that she founded an adoption agency to locate homes for biracial children from Asia? Indeed, few are aware that she advocated successfully for a genocide convention after World War II and was ahead of her time in envisioning a place for human rights in American foreign policy. Buck's literary works, often dismissed as simple portrayals of Chinese life, carried a surprising degree of innovation as she experimented with the styles and strategies of modernist artists. In Beyond The Good Earth, scholars and writers from the United States and China explore these and other often overlooked topics from the life of Pearl S. Buck, positioning her career in the context of recent scholarship on transnational humanitarian activism, women's rights activism, and civil rights activism.

Closely examining Jacques Lacan's unique mode of engagement with philosophy, Lacan with the Philosophers sheds new light on the interdisciplinary relations between philosophy and psychoanalysis. While highlighting the philosophies fundamental to the study of Lacan's psychanalysis, Ruth Ronen reveals how Lacan resisted the straightforward use of these works. Lacan's use of philosophy actually has a startling effect in not only providing exceptional entries into the philosophical texts (of Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel), but also in exposing the affinity between philosophy and psychoanalysis around shared concepts (including truth, the unconscious, and desire), and at the same time affirming the irreducible difference between the analyst and the philosopher. Inspired by Lacan's resistance to philosophy, Ruth Ronen addresses Lacan's use of philosophy to create a fertile moment of exchange. Straddling the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis with equal emphasis, Lacan with the Philosophers develops a unique interdisciplinary analysis and offers a new perspective on the body of Lacan's writings.