|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
Winner of the People's Literature Award, WINTER PASTURE has been a
bestselling book in China for several years. Li Juan has been
widely lauded in the international literary community for her
unique contribution to the narrative non-fiction genre. WINTER
PASTURE is her crowning achievement, shattering the boundaries
between nature writing and personal memoir. Li Juan and her mother
own a small convenience store in the Altai Mountains in
Northwestern China, where she writes about her life among
grasslands and snowy peaks. To her neighbors' surprise, Li decides
to join a family of Kazakh herders as they take their 30 boisterous
camels, 500 sheep and over 100 cattle and horses to pasture for the
winter. The so-called "winter pasture" occurs in a remote region
that stretches from the Ulungur River to the Heavenly Mountains. As
she journeys across the vast, seemingly endless sand dunes, she
helps herd sheep, rides horses, chases after camels, builds an
underground home using manure, gathers snow for water, and more.
With a keen eye for the understated elegance of the natural world,
and a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor, Li vividly captures
both the extraordinary hardships and the ordinary preoccupations of
the day-to-day of the men and women struggling to get by in this
desolate landscape. Her companions include Cuma, the often drunk
but mostly responsible father; his teenage daughter, Kama, who
feels the burden of the world on her shoulders and dreams of going
to college; his reticent wife, a paragon of decorum against all
odds, who is simply known as "sister-in-law." In bringing this
faraway world to English language readers here for the first time,
Li creates an intimate bond with the rugged people, the remote
places and the nomadic lifestyle. In the signature style that made
her an international sensation, Li Juan transcends the travel
memoir genre to deliver an indelible and immersive reading
experience on every page.
Still Life Photography reveals the aesthetic characteristics of
what everyday people see, use and eat. It is a stark and relentless
display of normality, embracing the unappreciated or negative. All
aspects of ordinary life are re-discovered and re-illustrated via
the camera lens. This book illuminates the unexpected potential of
the objects surrounding us, and at the core of each photo lays an
invitation to take a fresh look at life.
Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into
the relationship between cultural production, society, and the
environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as
well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their
perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting
ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central
role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first
English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of
ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan's important
contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging
"vernacular" trend in the field emphasizing the significance of
local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies,
aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique
history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate
generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology
and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues
such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction,
energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In
hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a
success narrative among Asia's "Four Little Dragons," but as a
cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial
exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume
can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial,
capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars'
readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and
aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries,
and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of
ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by
the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is
a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The
succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even
more complex by the island's sixteen aboriginal groups and several
diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates,
and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an
ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity
urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic,
comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity,
either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan
features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This
cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to
offer current ecocritical scholarship.
|
|