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.

Modernism in British arts, literature and philosophy is manifest as a unique thing around and after 1900. This paradigm shift in all arts and modern science made traditional beliefs, norms, and social patterns obsolete. Forerunners were 19th-century intellectuals, who favoured a new and lively spiritual culture. A new concept of reality not only changed the view of nature (atomic physics) but also the structure and gist of literature. As the belief in the visible world declined, consciousness and symbolism (surface and depth structures) occupied the focus of attention. Literature became an autonomous field. From artistic subjectivity modernism led the way to crystallizing creations of complex imaginative structures. Simultaneously, neorealism in philosophy and relativity in physics substituted a worn-out mechanistic world picture by a scientific reality reaching far beyond the visible world.

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic writings. Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama, Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., were assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's interpretation in their literary exposes that a riot's disjointed and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice. Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and education-tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement. Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.

Occupy Pynchon examines power and resistance in the writer's post-Gravity's Rainbow novels. As Sean Carswell shows, Pynchon's representations of global power after the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s shed the paranoia and meta physical bent of his first three novels and share a great deal in common with the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's critical trilogy, Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. In both cases, the authors describe global power as a horizontal network of multinational corporations, national governments, and supranational institutions. Pynchon, as do Hardt and Negri, theorizes resistance as a horizontal network of individuals who work together, without sacrificing their singularities, to resist the political and economic exploitation of empire. Carswell enriches this examination of Pynchon's politics as made evident in Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013) by reading the novels alongside the global resistance movements of the early 2010s. Beginning with the Arab Spring and progressing into the Occupy Movement, political activists engaged in a global uprising. The ensuing struggle mirrored Pynchon's concepts of power and resistance, and Occupy activists in particular constructed their movement around the same philosophical tradition from which Pynchon, as well as Hardt and Negri, emerges. This exploration of Pynchon shines a new light on Pynchon studies, recasting his post-1970s fiction as central to his vision of resisting global neoliberal capitalism.

Language learning is retraining your brain, and any form of training requires focus, constant practice, and support. This guide gives the ultimate support by helping the user to instantly create hundreds of sentences for communication in German. Color-coded and easy-to-use, this laminated, portable guide can be used for students and travelers alike. 6 page laminated guide includes: Rules to Remember Pronunciation (Aussprache) Greetings & Goodbyes (Grussworte und Verabschiedungen) Questions (Fragen) Social Courtesies (Hoeflichkeit) Numbers (Zahlen) Days of the Week (Wochentage) Negatives (Negation) Months of the Year (Monate) Expressing Opinions (seine Meinung sagen) Time Expressions (Zeitausdrucke) Seasons (Jahreszeiten) Colors (Farben) Weather (Wetter) On the Phone (Am Telefon) Basic Statements (Aussagen) Personal Information (Persoenliche Angaben) Family (Familie) Work Life (Arbeit und Beruf) Shopping (Einkaufen) Money (Geld) House & Home (zu Hause) Food (Nahrung) Spare Time (Freizeit) Transportation (Transportation) Travel (Reisen) Health (Gesundheit) In Case of Emergencies (Im Notfall) Technology & Social Media (Technologie und soziale Medien) Directions (Wegbeschreibung)

In the early 1800s, American critics warned about the danger of literature as a distraction from reality. Later critical accounts held that American literature during the antebellum period was idealistic and that literature grew more realistic after the horrors of the Civil War. By focusing on three leading American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson Reading Reality challenges that analysis. Thomas Finan reveals how antebellum authors used words such as ""real"" and ""reality"" as key terms for literary discourse and claimed that the ""real"" was, in fact, central to their literary enterprise. He argues that for many Americans in the early nineteenth century, the ""real"" was often not synonymous with the physical world. It could refer to the spiritual, the sincere, or the individual's experience. He further explains how this awareness revises our understanding of the literary and conceptual strategies of American writers. By unpacking antebellum senses of the ""real,"" Finan casts new light on the formal traits of the period's literature, the pressures of the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America, and the surprising possibilities of literary reading.

At a time in which many in the United States see Spanish America as a distinct and, for some, threatening culture clearly differentiated from that of Europe and the US, it may be of use to look at the works of some of the most representative and celebrated writers from the region to see how they imagined their relationship to Western culture and literature. In fact, while authors across stylistic and political divides-like Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Luis Borges, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez-see their work as being framed within the confines of a globalized Western literary tradition, their relationship, rather than epigonal, is often subversive. Borges and Kafka, Bolano and Bloom is a parsing not simply of these authors' reactions to a canon, but of the notion of canon writ large and the inequities and erasures therein. It concludes with a look at the testimonial and autobiographical writings of Rigoberta Menchu and Lurgio Gavilan, who arguably represent the trajectory of Indigenous testimonial and autobiographical writing during the last forty years, noting how their texts represent alternative ways of relating to national and, on occasion, Western cultures. This study is a new attempt to map writers' diverse ways of thinking about locality and universality from within and without what is known as the canon.