In East Asia : Identities and Change in the Modern World, accomplished historian R. Keith Schoppa uses the prism of cultural identities to examine the... four countries that make up the East Asian cultural sphere—China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—from roughly 1700 to the present. This book explores modern East Asian history through the themes of identities and change.

An exciting explosion of urban expansion is occurring in East Asia: cities such as Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai are expanding... at a prodigious rate and bringing widespread change to the region. Peter G. Rowe's East Asia Modern is a timely comparative analysis of urban growth in this rapidly evolving part of the globe.A renowned scholar on East Asian architecture and urbanism, Peter G. Rowe examines how the unique modernizing process of East Asian cities can be most usefully understood. Rowe offers a historical assessment of the region, chronicling the cities' development over the last century and setting into context their individual paths toward becoming modern. Rowe explains what the modernizing process has meant for the cultural diffusion of predominantly Western ideas, how East Asian urban regions have developed a distinct type of modernity, and what lessons can be gleaned from the contemporary East Asian experience. Refuting many common misconceptions about contemporary East Asian life, East Asia Modern offers a readable critical assessment of life in modern East Asia while also pointing to possibilities for the future.

This is a discussion of the contribution and effects of East Asian art on American culture. Warren Cohen portrays the assembling of the great American... collections of East Asian art and explains how this art became part of the cultural consciousness of the people of the USA, transforming their culture into something more complex than the Western civilization brought from Europe. Cohen tells of art collectors, dealers and historians, of museums and curators, of art and imperialism, art and politics, and art as an instrument of foreign policy. The book demonstrates how art collecting interacts with international politics and business. The recent decline in American economic power, the author argues, was first obvious in the art world when American collectors found themselves unable to compete with their Japanese and Hong Kong counterparts.

This book presents a comprehensive account of East Asian cinema, its successes and challenges. East Asian cinema is a growing industry, producing films... popular all over the world. This book examines not only films, but the global forces affecting their production. It is a fascinating study for anyone interested in film or East Asian culture. "East Asian Screen Industries" is a guide to the film industries of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the PRC. The authors examine how local production has responded to global trends and explore the effects of widespread de-regulation and China's accession to the World Trade Organisation.

This book paints a vivid picture of women's active involvement in reshaping intimate and public sexual life in East Asia. In bringing together exciting... new feminist research on sexuality from East Asia and making it available to a wider audience, East Asian Sexualities unsettles stereotypes, rectifies lack of awareness and demonstrates that East Asia matters. The chapters address the diversity and variety of everyday sexual lives and sexual politics in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. They range from workplace sexual cultures, trans-national sexual relations, the conditions of sex-work and the emergence of new sexual desires, cultures and movements.

In Eric Miles Williamson's debut novel, young T-Bird Murphy seeks to gain a foothold in the turbulent and menacing world of 60's and 70's Oakland. ... While his mother runs with Hell's Angel's bikers, T-Bird falls beneath the men's fists and favors, finds solace and hope in the slightest of rewards, and seeks to survive. Soon, his ex-con father returns to town, and what follows is a raw, powerful, poetic story of one boy's passage into adulthood.

Combining engaging narrative with analytic power, this book presents the past and present of East Central Europe in the larger context of the political... and economic history of the Continent.The central theme of the book is best summarized by the familiar French proverb that the more things change the more they are the same. For while the historical experience of East Central Europe in the modern world may be described as one of endemic political change—from Western liberalism to corrupted parliamentarism, from fascism to state socialism imposed by the Soviet Union, and now to a fledgling new liberalism under Western auspices—all these political systems faced the same stubborn facts of life: the region’s economic backwardness vis-à-vis the West, the debilities of small nationhood, and the cultural divide between the lands of eastern and western Christianity.In dealing with this volatile mix of continuity and change, this book provides a new interpretation of the politics of the region in the modern period. At the same time, it also contributes to the ongoing dialogue among disciplines by attempting to strike a better balance between cultural and economic explanations of conflict, between structural and institutional approaches to politics, and, above all, between intra- and extra-societal forces that shape power and politics in national states.For the purposes of this book, East Central Europe is defined as the territory of the historical precursors, and contemporary successors, of the eight lesser member states of the former Soviet Bloc.

The study of personal relationships has proliferated as an interdisciplinary social science field. In this volume, leading authority Steve Duck brings... the reader up to date on basic concepts and research findings on all aspects of personal relationships. The book discusses how children learn key relationship skills and how adult relationships start, develop, and are sustained, including friendship, romance, and heterosexual and same-sex partnerships. Coverage of clinical and social policy implications of the research gives the book a practical edge. This accessible, engaging book contains much of value for students of relationships, communication studies, and psychology.

From cuisine and martial arts to sex and self-esteem, East Eats West shines new light on the bridges and crossroads where two hemispheres meld into one... worldwide ''immigrant nation.'' In this new nation, with its amalgamation of divergent ideas, tastes, and styles, today's bold fusion becomes tomorrow's classic. But while the space between East and West continues to shrink in this age of globalization, some cultural gaps remain. In this collection of twenty-one personal essays, Andrew Lam, the award-winning author of Perfume Dreams, continues to explore the Vietnamese diaspora, this time concentrating not only on how the East and West have changed but how they are changing each other. Lively and engaging, East Eats West searches for meaning in nebulous territory charted by very few. Part memoir, part meditation, and part cultural anthropology, East Eats West is about thriving in the West with one foot still in the East.

Where is the East End? It’s where the sun comes up and where you bury the dead. It’s where George Walker set six of his plays. It’s the East End... of Toronto; the Lower East Side of New York; down by the East River; East L.A.; East Vancouver. It’s where you get down to the basics of beginnings and endings, and how you get from each of those ends to the other. It’s where Walker’s settings have “come home.” From his offer of tenuous hope to the denizens of a city salvaged from the powerful and the greedy in Beautiful City (1987); to his championing of women in Love and Anger (1989); to his explorations of sex and gender issues among three young people in Tough! (1993), Walker continues his explorations of characters living in extremity in the arena of a political comedy uniquely his own.

Immortal verses by one of the 20th century's greatest poets appear in this compilation of all the poems from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael... Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Includes "The Second Coming," "A Prayer for My Daughter," "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," and many others.

Ireland's Easter Rising of 1916 is one of the handful of modern historical events that instantly created its own mythology and changed millions of lives... forever. Charles Townshend's remarkable new book vividly re-creates this extraordinary time when a powerful narrative was born and Ireland was launched into a new world.