In inviting a rethinking of ideas of foreignness and selfhood, this book explores Sino-British encounters in eighteenth-century English literature, providing detailed critical and literary analysis of individual texts pertaining to China from this period. The author provides a synthesis of approaches to China in eighteenth-century English literature, involving fictional writing related to China, adaptations of Chinese source texts, and translations of Chinese literary works. By discussing various writings about tea and tea-drinking, Arthur Murphy’s The Orphan of China (1759), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1760–62), and Thomas Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan (1761), she highlights the significance of reading these texts not simply as documents of a historical kind, but as texts that are worthy of literary and artistic attention on the basis of their rich variety in genre, style, and themes. The author proposes that Chinese and British cultures are not antithetical entities: they exist in relation to one another and create possibilities in the continuing appreciation of diversity amidst a drive to universality. This study will be primarily helpful to university students and professors of English literature, comparative literature, and history worldwide.

Resistance and Identity in Twenty-First Century Literature and Culture: Voices of the Marginalized is a compendium of reflections on literary texts, politics of literature and culture. The book proffers ruminations on the pivotal role of constructive and positive resistance to reconstruct identities for meaningful human existence. The disciplinary power and dominance coerce the natural body to resist and yearn for freedom. One can establish unique identity by refusing to conform to pressures of society that deform the natural body. Dominant forces and oppressive structures evoke resistance that can range from 'polite demurral' to 'refusal'. Resistance comes from the 'will' that refuses to be controlled and governed. The 'refusal' of the ordinary illuminates ordinary lives/ bodies. Language and literary texts contain essential truths of such human existence. Words and imaginary worlds in literary works reveal truth and suggest possibilities for reconfiguring the order.

This collection of essays examines the various encounters between Britain and the Other, from a cultural, racial, ethnic, artistic and social perspective. It investigates the constructions of various figures of the foreigner in the British Isles through representations and discourses in the political and literary fields, as well as in the visual arts from the 17th century to the contemporary period. This volume presents a diverse selection of contributions which offer some common concerns abo ...

This collection of essays examines the various encounters between Britain and the Other, from a cultural, racial, ethnic, artistic and social perspective. It investigates the constructions of various figures of the foreigner in the British Isles through representations and discourses in the political and literary fields, as well as in the visual arts from the 17th century to the contemporary period. This volume presents a diverse selection of contributions which offer some common concerns about the forging of the image of the Other and the writing of the Self. The authors of this book look at various representations of Otherness in literature, history and the arts, and investigate the ways the Other was imagined, fabricated and used. The chapters explore the question of â oeOthernessâ in its multifarious dimensions, such as the image of immigrants in the United Kingdom, the relationship between Ireland and Britain, the figure of the Orient and the Far East, the perception of continental Europe in Britain, and the consequences of encounters between Britons and indigenous peoples in America, Canada or Africa. Following the theories of, among others, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, some of the essays discuss Orientalism and the construction of stereotypes. They emphasize how foreignness and selfhood were staged and performed through visual practices and discourses, with their possible effects of distortions and stereotyping. The encounters with various Others could indeed be confrontational or lead to imitation, appropriation, cultural syncretism and complex processes of identity-building. The topics addressed in this book propose an interdisciplinary approach in cultural studies, and analyse the theme in fields such as colonial, imperial and post-colonial histories, literature, art history, sociology and politics. Through different case studies, the fluctuating and oftentimes highly ambivalent perceptions of foreignness reveal how crucial a role Otherness played in fashioning Britainâ (TM)s national, religious, cultural and social identity.

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon calls attention to the dynamic interaction that takes place between hermeneutics and phenomenology in Ricoeur’s thought. It could be said that Ricoeur’s thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return “to the things themselves.” These two demands are interwoven insofar as there is a hermeneutic component of the phenomenological attempt to go beyond the surface of things to their deeper meaning, just as there is a phenomenological component of the hermeneutic attempt to establish a critical distance toward the world to which we belong. For this reason, Ricoeur’s thought involves a back and forth movement between the text and the phenomenon. Although this double movement was a theme of many of Ricoeur’s essays in the middle of his career, the essays in this book suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology remains implicit throughout his work. The chapters aim to highlight, in much greater detail, how this back and forth movement between phenomenology and hermeneutics takes place with respect to many important philosophical themes, including the experience of the body, history, language, memory, personal identity, and intersubjectivity.

This 2003 book focuses on neuropsychiatric models of self-consciousness, set against introductory essays describing the philosophical, historical and psychological approaches.