In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese—often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude—this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.

In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations.

As a country, Taiwan is one of the most vibrant, exciting, colourful and entrepreneurial on earth. The contributors reveal what underpins the vitality of Taiwan, examining the relevance of its democratic politics, civil society and the presence of an existential threat from China, as well as the importance of its international business nexus.

"... an important contribution to the study of recent Chinese literature." -- Choice "This fine, scholarly survey of Chinese literature since 1949... discusses such trends as modernism, nativism, realism, root-seeking and 'scar' literature, 'misty' poets, and political, feminist, and societal issues in modern Chinese literature." -- Library Journal This volume is a survey of modern Chinese literature in the second half of the twentieth century. It has three goals: (1) to introduce figures, works, movements, and debates that constitute the dynamics of Chinese literature from 1949 to the end of the century; (2) to depict the enunciative endeavors, ranging from ideological treatises to avant-garde experiments, that inform the polyphonic discourse of Chinese cultural politics; (3) to observe the historical factors that enacted the interplay of literary (post)modernities across the Chinese communities in the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas.

A lighthearted and lyrical new collection of observations on fly-fishing by the author of Still Life with Brook Trout features whimsical complaints about what the author believes is wrong with the world, both within and outside the fishing community. 50,000 first printing.

This carefully crafted ebook: “A FOOL'S ERRAND & BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. “A Fool's Errand. By One of the Fools” – After the American Civil War, Comfort Servosse, a Yankee gentleman, decides to purchase a Southern Plantation for himself and his family. But unlike other white owners, Servosse is actually interested in the well-being of his black subjects to the extent of calling the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) a terrorist organisation and blaming Theodore Roosevelt for the failure of Reconstruction of South! Soon enough, Servosse finds himself amongst his angry white neighbours and things take a dramatic turn… “Bricks Without Straw” (A Sequel) – In a chilling sequel to “A Fool's Errand”, Albion Winegar Tourgée shows how KKK unleashed their terror on a group of emancipated slaves who want to start their life afresh by buying new land and starting their own businesses. Suddenly out of nowhere, Klan's terrorism begin new wave of slavery and nothing seems to stop them! Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838–1905) was an American soldier, Radical Republican, lawyer, writer, politician, and diplomat. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, established the historically black women's college Bennett College, and litigated for the plaintiff Homer Plessy in the famous segregation case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Historian Mark Elliott credits Tourgée with introducing the metaphor of "color-blind justice" into legal discourse.