Download The Song of Everlasting Sorrow PDF

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 0231143435
Pages : 452 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (143 downloads)

Download The Song of Everlasting Sorrow PDF Format Full Free by Anyi Wang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in post-World War II Shanghai, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao, a girl born of the longtong, the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods. Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, and this fleeting moment of stardom becomes the pinnacle of her life. During the next four decades, Wang Qiyao indulges in the decadent pleasures of pre-liberation Shanghai, secretly playing mahjong during the antirightist Movement and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Surviving the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history, Wang Qiyao emerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of "old Shanghai"?a living incarnation of a new, commodified nostalgia that prizes splendor and sophistication?only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the pulpy Hollywood noirs of her youth. From the violent persecution of communism to the liberalism and openness of the age of reform, this sorrowful tale of old China versus new, of perseverance in the face of adversity, is a timeless rendering of our never-ending quest for transformation and beauty.


Download Wang Anyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow PDF

Wang Anyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Author :
Publisher :
Release Date :
ISBN 13 :
Pages : 210 pages
Rating : 4./5 ( downloads)

Download Wang Anyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow PDF Format Full Free by Catherine A. Saint Jean and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is a close reading, through selected passages, of Wang Anyi's novel chang hen ge, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai. It uses the English translation of Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan and Wang Anyi's original Chinese text. This study is informed by other works of fiction set in Shanghai and by various works of literary analysis. Reading The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (chang hen ge) as a shishi (poet-historian) novel of the 1990's posits that, as a writer of the Cultural Revolution's Lost Generation, Wang creates a poetic allusion to convey the pain experienced in contemplating the imposed historiographies of her lifetime, historiographies that forestall a close examination of the Cultural Revolution and erase the 1989 Tian Anmen events. The elegiac reference to the past and allusion to the present are achieved in the novel through the author's appropriation of the poetic genre of huaigu, a meditation on the past. The creation of the narrator as a poet-storyteller persona allows for a metatext on the moral implication of historical amnesia. The metatext on historiography and the elegiac evocation of sorrow through huaigu are key features that confer a shishi (poet-historian) quality to Wang Anyi's novel.


Download The Song of Everlasting Sorrow PDF

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 0231513097
Pages : 452 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (513 downloads)

Download The Song of Everlasting Sorrow PDF Format Full Free by Wang Anyi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-22 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic story of a woman in post-World War II China. “[A] complex and penetrating portrayal . . . that best displays [Anyi’s] gifts as a novelist.”—The New York Times Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao—a girl born of the longtang, the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai’s working-class neighborhoods—seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant. This fleeting moment of stardom becomes the pinnacle of her life. During the next four decades, Wang Qiyao indulges in the decadent pleasures of pre-liberation Shanghai, secretly playing mahjong during the Anti-Rightist Movement and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Surviving the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history, Wang Qiyao emerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of “old Shanghai”—a living incarnation of a new, commodified nostalgia that prizes splendor and sophistication—only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the pulpy Hollywood noirs of her youth. From the violent persecution of communism to the liberalism and openness of the age of reform, this sorrowful tale of old China versus new, of perseverance in the face of adversity, is a timeless rendering of our never-ending quest for transformation and beauty. “A beautifully constructed cyclical narrative . . . ingenious . . . As the novel builds to its tragic conclusion, the manner in which character types and events recur against the city’s shifting backdrop is impossible to forget.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[A] literary masterpiece . . . The story is spellbinding, colorful, and sad; the writing is dense and thoughtful . . . a page-turner right up to the end.”—Historical Novel Society


Download Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai PDF

Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai

Author :
Publisher : SUNY Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 1438479255
Pages : 266 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (479 downloads)

Download Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai PDF Format Full Free by Lisa Bernstein and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai provides international and interdisciplinary perspectives on representations of Shanghai, a contested location within political discourse and cultural imagination. Shanghai's complex history as a quasi-colonial city, and its contradictory identity as the birthplace of Communist China and the epitome of twenty-first-century capitalism, make it an especially fascinating subject. Contributors examine representations of Shanghai in film, art, literature, memoir, theater, and mass media from the past one hundred years. They address the ways in which texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have rewritten past and present Shanghai to reflect our own wishes and anguishes, show how the city resists static interpretations, and challenge notions of authentic representation and identity. By revealing and questioning persistent stereotypes and constructed versions of East and West, the essays offer diverse views so as to create a genuine exchange with contemporary global audiences. A wide variety of texts are discussed, including the films Street Angel (1937) and The White Countess (2005), and the novels The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996) and Shanghai Baby (1999).


Download Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature PDF

Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 1538130068
Pages : 825 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (13 downloads)

Download Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature PDF Format Full Free by Li-hua Ying and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 825 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Chinese literature has been flourishing for over a century, with varying degrees of intensity and energy at different junctures of history and points of locale. An integral part of world literature from the moment it was born, it has been in constant dialogue with its counterparts from the rest of the world. As it has been challenged and enriched by external influences, it has contributed to the wealth of literary culture of the entire world. In terms of themes and styles, modern Chinese literature is rich and varied; from the revolutionary to the pastoral, from romanticism to feminism, from modernism to post-modernism, critical realism, psychological realism, socialist realism, and magical realism. Indeed, it encompasses a full range of ideological and aesthetic concerns. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature in modern China. It offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Chinese literature.


Download Aspects of Urbanization in China PDF

Aspects of Urbanization in China

Author :
Publisher : Amsterdam University Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 9089643982
Pages : 422 pages
Rating : 4.9/5 (643 downloads)

Download Aspects of Urbanization in China PDF Format Full Free by Gregory Bracken and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's opkomst als wereldmacht is een van de ingrijpendste gebeurtenissen van deze tijd. Honderden miljoenen mensen zijn de armoede ontvlucht dankzij de snelle industrialisatie van het land. De wonderbaarlijke economische groei van China heeft zijn nadelen, iets wat vaak het meest pijnlijk duidelijk wordt in de steden. Deze studie is geschreven door wetenschappers uit verschillende disciplines, waaronder architectuur, stedenbouw, sociale wetenschappen, aardrijkskunde en antrolpologie. Een dee van de auteurs behandelt de mondiale ambities van de steden, terwijl andere hun culturele en architecturale uitingen onderzoeken.


Download Red Creative PDF

Red Creative

Author :
Publisher : Intellect Books
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 1789382319
Pages : 429 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (382 downloads)

Download Red Creative PDF Format Full Free by Justin O'Connor and published by Intellect Books. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together multiple strands of debate around the cultural creative industries and contemporary capitalism, China’s position in global capitalism, the future of modernity and new ways of thinking about culture and cultural policy. Clearly written and engaging, it is the first study to provide a critical lens on creative industries discourse and to bring it together with detailed historical and social analysis. It analyses the ongoing development of China’s cultural industries, examining the institutions, regulations, interests and markets that underpin the Chinese cultural economy and the strategic position of Shanghai within that economy. Explores cultural policy reforms in post-colonial China and articulates Shanghai’s significance in paving China’s path to modernity and entry to global capitalism. In-depth and illuminating, this book situates China’s contemporary cultural economy in its larger global and historical context, revealing the limits of Western thought in understanding Chinese history, culture and society. This book is aimed at a broad, educated audience who seek to engage more with what is happening in China, especially in the cultural field. It tries to take such an audience outside the standard frame of Western modernity, suggesting the possibility of different historical trajectories and possibilities. Because the book is theoretical and empirical in its approach, it will be of strong interest to both those interested in Chinese cultural policy and the creative industries approach generally. Cultural and creative industries is an increasingly important subject area in Higher Education, with undergraduate and postgraduate programs representing some of the fastest growing areas in arts, humanities and social science faculties. This audience is increasingly global, as this policy debate has now moved outside the Western countries whose economic competitiveness it was meant to promote. It is an agenda promoted by agencies such as UNESCO, UNCTAD, the World Bank, British Council and the Goethe Institute. Primary readership will be academics with a particular interest in Chinese culture, cultural studies, media studies, public policy and management studies, cultural policy, East Asian studies and cultural policy researchers. It will also be relevant to all those interested in China and Chinese’s culture; and those interested in the history of Shanghai and the role it plays in contemporary Chinese culture and politics. Given the current interest in China, it may also be of wider appeal too.


Download Sino-Japanese Transculturation PDF

Sino-Japanese Transculturation

Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 073917150X
Pages : 318 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (171 downloads)

Download Sino-Japanese Transculturation PDF Format Full Free by Richard King and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a multi-author work which examines the cultural dimensions of the relations between East Asia's two great powers, China and Japan, in a period of change and turmoil, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. This period saw Japanese invasion of China, the occupation of China's North-east (Manchuria) and Taiwan, and war between the two nations from 1937-1945; the scars of that war are still evident in relations between the two countries today. In their quest for modernity, the rulers and leading thinkers of China and Japan defined themselves in contradisctinction to the other, influenced both by traditional bonds of classical culture and by the influx of new Western ideas that flowed through Japan to China. The experiences of intellectual and cultural awakening in the two countries were inextricably linked, as our studies of poetry, fiction, philosophy, theatre, and popular culture demonstrate. The chapters explore this process of "transculturation" - the sharing and exchange of ideas and artistic expression - not only in Japan and China, but in the larger region which Joshua Fogel has called the "Sinosphere," an area including Korea and parts of Southeast Asia with a shared heritage of Confucian statecraft and values underpinned by the classical Chinese language. The authors of the chapters, who include established senior academics and younger scholars, and employ a range of disciplines and methodologies, were selected by the editors for their expertise in particular aspects of this rich and complex cultural relationship. As for the editors: Richard King and Cody Poulton are scholars and translators of Chinese literature and Japanese theatre respectively, each taking a historical and comparative perspective to the study of their subject; Katsuhiko Endo is an intellectual historian dealing with both Japan and China.


Download An Infinite History PDF

An Infinite History

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 0691208182
Pages : 464 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (28 downloads)

Download An Infinite History PDF Format Full Free by Emma Rothschild and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative history of deep social and economic changes in France, told through the story of a single extended family across five generations Marie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoulême in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record through two documents: a power of attorney in connection with the property of her late husband, a carpenter on the island of Grenada, and a prenuptial contract for her daughter, signed by eighty-three people in Angoulême. Who was Marie Aymard? Who were all these people? And why were they together on a dark afternoon in December 1764? Beginning with these questions, An Infinite History offers a panoramic look at an extended family over five generations. Through ninety-eight connected stories about inquisitive, sociable individuals, ending with Marie Aymard’s great-great granddaughter in 1906, Emma Rothschild unfurls an innovative modern history of social and family networks, emigration, immobility, the French Revolution, and the transformation of nineteenth-century economic life. Rothschild spins a vast narrative resembling a period novel, one that looks at a large, obscure family, of whom almost no private letters survive, whose members traveled to Syria, Mexico, and Tahiti, and whose destinies were profoundly unequal, from a seamstress living in poverty in Paris to her third cousin, the cardinal of Algiers. Rothschild not only draws on discoveries in local archives but also uses new technologies, including the visualization of social networks, large-scale searches, and groundbreaking methods of genealogical research. An Infinite History demonstrates how the ordinary lives of one family over three centuries can constitute a remarkable record of deep social and economic changes.


Download Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature PDF

Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 1317236696
Pages : 740 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (236 downloads)

Download Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature PDF Format Full Free by Ming Dong Gu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature presents a comprehensive overview of Chinese literature from the 1910s to the present day. Featuring detailed studies of selected masterpieces, it adopts a thematic-comparative approach. By developing an innovative conceptual framework predicated on a new theory of periodization, it thus situates Chinese literature in the context of world literature, and the forces of globalization. Each section consists of a series of contributions examining the major literary genres, including fiction, poetry, essay drama and film. Offering an exciting account of the century-long process of literary modernization in China, the handbook’s themes include: Modernization of people and writing Realism, rmanticism and mdernist asthetics Chinese literature on the stage and screen Patriotism, war and revolution Feminism, liberalism and socialism Literature of reform, reflection and experimentation Literature of Taiwan, Hong Kong and new media This handbook provides an integration of biographical narrative with textual analysis, maintaining a subtle balance between comprehensive overview and in-depth examination. As such, it is an essential reference guide for all students and scholars of Chinese literature.


Download Shanghai Homes PDF

Shanghai Homes

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 0231538170
Pages : 304 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (538 downloads)

Download Shanghai Homes PDF Format Full Free by Jie Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.


Download The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature PDF

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 0231541147
Pages : 496 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (541 downloads)

Download The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature PDF Format Full Free by Kirk A. Denton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. The volume opens with thematic essays on the politics and ethics of writing literary history, the formation of the canon, the relationship between language and form, the role of literary institutions and communities, the effects of censorship, the representation of the Chinese diaspora, the rise and meaning of Sinophone literature, and the role of different media in the development of literature. Subsequent essays focus on authors, their works, and the schools with which they were aligned, featuring key names, titles, and terms in English and in Chinese characters. Woven throughout are pieces on late Qing fiction, popular entertainment fiction, martial arts fiction, experimental theater, post-Mao avant-garde poetry, post–martial law fiction from Taiwan, contemporary genre fiction from China, and recent Internet literature. The volume includes essays on such authors as Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, Jin Yong, Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Gao Xingjian, and Yan Lianke. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern literature in the Chinese-speaking world.


Download Remaking China's Great Cities PDF

Remaking China's Great Cities

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 1317656113
Pages : 256 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (656 downloads)

Download Remaking China's Great Cities PDF Format Full Free by Samuel Y. Liang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s rapid urbanization has restructured the great socialist cities Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou into mega cities that embrace global capitalism. This book focuses on the urban transformations of these three cities: Beijing is the nation’s political and cultural capital; Shanghai is the economic and financial powerhouse; and Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province and the regional center of south China. All are historical cities with rich imperial, colonial, and regional heritages, and all have been drastically transformed in the last six decades. This book examines the cities’ continuous urban legacies since 1949 in relation to state governance, economic reforms, and cultural production. By adopting local historical perspectives, it offers more nuanced accounts of the current urban change than the modernization/globalization paradigm and conceptualizes the change in the context of the cities’ socialist, colonial, and imperial legacies. Specifically, Samuel Y. Liang offers an overview of the urban planning and territorial expansion of the great cities since 1949; explores the production and consumption of urban housing, its spatial forms, media representations, and socio-political implications; and examines the state-led redevelopment of old urban cores and residential neighborhoods, and the urban conservation movement. Remaking China’s Great Cities will be of great interest to students and scholars working across a range of fields including Chinese studies, Chinese culture and society, urban studies and architecture.


Download The A to Z of Modern Chinese Literature PDF

The A to Z of Modern Chinese Literature

Author :
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 1461731879
Pages : 500 pages
Rating : 4.8/5 (731 downloads)

Download The A to Z of Modern Chinese Literature PDF Format Full Free by Li-hua Ying and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The A to Z of Modern Chinese Literature presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature in modern China. It offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Chinese literature.


Download Confucius’ Courtyard PDF

Confucius’ Courtyard

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 1350217646
Pages : 368 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (217 downloads)

Download Confucius’ Courtyard PDF Format Full Free by Xing Ruan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than three thousand years, Chinese life – from the city and the imperial palace, to the temple, the market and the family home – was configured around the courtyard. So too were the accomplishments of China's artistic, philosophical and institutional classes. Confucius' Courtyard tells the story of how the courtyard – that most singular and persistent architectural form – holds the key to understanding, even today, much of Chinese society and culture. Part architectural history, and part introduction to the cultural and philosophical history of China, the book explores the Chinese view of the world, and reveals the extent to which this is inextricably intertwined with the ancient concept of the courtyard, a place and a way of life which, it appears, has been almost entirely overlooked in China since the middle of the 20th century, and in the West for centuries. Along the way, it provides an accessible introduction to the Confucian idea of zhongyong ('the Middle Way'), the Chinese moral universe and the virtuous good life in the absence of an awesome God, and shows how these can only be fully understood through the humble courtyard – a space which is grounded in the earth, yet open to the heavens. Erudite, elegant and illustrated throughout by the author's own architectural drawings and sketches, Confucius' Courtyard weaves together architecture, philosophy and cultural history to explore what lies at the very heart of Chinese civilization.


Download A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On PDF

A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 0231555997
Pages : pages
Rating : 4.9/5 (555 downloads)

Download A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On PDF Format Full Free by Kai-cheung Dung and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature begins from a piece of ephemera, usually consumer products or pop culture phenomena, and develops alternately comic and poignant snapshots of urban life. Dung’s sketches center on once-trendy items that evoke the world at the turn of the millennium, such as Hello Kitty, Final Fantasy VIII, a Windows 98 disk, a clamshell mobile phone, Air Jordans, and cargo shorts. The protagonist of each piece, typically a young woman, is struck by an odd, even overriding obsession with an object or fad. Characters embark on brief dalliances or relationships lasting no longer than the fashions that sparked them. Dung blends vivid everyday details—Portuguese egg tarts, Japanese TV shows, the Hong Kong subway—with situations that are often fantastical or preposterous. This catalog of vanished products illuminates how people use objects to define and even invent their own selves. A major work from one of Hong Kong’s most gifted and original writers, Dung’s archaeology of the end of the twentieth century speaks to perennial questions about consumerism, nostalgia, and identity.


Download Once Upon a China PDF

Once Upon a China

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Release Date :
ISBN 13 : 1315402521
Pages : 328 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (42 downloads)

Download Once Upon a China PDF Format Full Free by CJ Lim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-16 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once Upon a China is an unconventional architectural story of great beauty, empathy, honour and sadness. The chapters are ingenious reimaginations of ‘Dream of the Red Mansion’, ‘Journey to the West ’, ‘The Water Margin’, and ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, and are conceived as specific themes of Chinese identity: domesticity, consumerism, democracy and adaptability. These four seminal pre-modern fictions contain diverse voices and philosophical perspectives on history as well as satires that have defined past developments of Chinese societies, politics and the built environment. Comics is an unorthodox but extraordinary medium for architectural speculations. The eccentric characteristics of comic-inspired drawings in this book enrich the processes of conception and conceptualisation of design – their fragmented yet sequential nature proves versatile in the imagination of spatial experiences, enabling the complex stories of place, brief and building to materialise. At the same time, the politicisation of architecture through comics engenders a sense of optimism to reappraise Chinese design futures and critical thinking beyond the exuberance of non-contextual Western capitalist models.