'Defying the Dragon' tells a remarkable story of audacity: of how the people of Hong Kong challenged the PRC's authority, just as its president reached the height of his powers. Is Xi's China as unshakeable as it seems? What are its real interests in Hong Kong? Why are Beijing's time-honoured means of control no longer working there? And where does this leave Hongkongers themselves? Stephen Vines has lived in Hong Kong for over three decades. His book shrewdly unpacks the Hong Kong-China relationship and its wider significance-right up to the astonishing convergence of political turmoil and international crisis with Covid-19 and the 2020 crackdown. Vividly describing the uprising from street level, Vines explains how and why it unfolded, and its global repercussions. Now, the international community is reassessing relations with Beijing, just as Hong Kong's rebellion and China's handling of the pandemic have exposed the regime's weakness. In a crisis that has become existential all round, what lies ahead for Hong Kong, China and the world?

Looks at the return of the sublime in post-modernity, and at intimations of a 'post-Romantic' sublime in Romanticism itself. The sublime is explored as a discourse of 'invention' -- taking the Latin meaning of to 'come upon', 'find', 'discover' that involves an encounter with the new, the unregulated and the surprising. Lyotard and Zizek, among others, have reconfigured the sublime for post-modernity by exceeding the subject-centred discourse of Romantic aesthetics, and promoting not a sublime of the subject, but of the unpresentable, the 'Real', the unknown, the other. 'Reinventing the Sublime' looks at 18th-century, Romantic, modernist and post-modern 'inventions' of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics and history, including '9/11'. It reads Burke and Kant alongside post-modern discourses on the sublime, and Wordsworth, De Quincey and Mary Shelley in relation to temporality and materiality in Romanticism, and considers 'modernist' inflections of the sublime in T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes in relation to the themes of disjunction and excess in modernity. The author examines the postmodern revisiting of the sublime in Thomas Pynchon, D.M Thomas and Toni Morrison, and draws on Lyotard's reading of the sublime as an aesthetic of the avant-garde and as a singular and disruptive 'event', to argue that the sublime in its post-modern and contemporary forms encodes an anxious but affirmative relationship to the ironies of temporality and history. 'Reinventing the Sublime' focuses on the endurance of the sublime in contemporary thinking, and on the way that the sublime can be read as a figure of the relationship of representation to temporality itself.

William Blake is acknowledged as a poet of opposition and contradiction: a writer who, from Songs of Innocence and Experience to his last epic Jerusalem, ceaselessly explored the conflicts between limitation and possibility, reason and energy, torment and joy. But the contradictions within Blake's own 'visionary' poetics are less often considered. Throughout his work, Blake powerfully dramatises the energies and agonies of his own poetic labour.