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Our Year of the Snake Sale is just a day away! Click on the banner to view a complete, searchable list of sale books—including the just-published new edition of Mary Sia’s Classic Chinese Cookbook and all of John DeFrancis’ popular dictionaries (ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, ABC Chinese-English Dictionary: Desk Reference Edition, ABC English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary)—and visit www.uhpress.hawaii.edu from Friday, February 8 (noon, HST) to Wednesday, February 13 (noon, HST). (Discount prices will not appear online until the sale begins.)
Kung Hee Fat Choy! The Year of the Black Snake officially begins on Sunday, February 10, but you don‘t have to wait until then to save 40% on select China titles, both published and distributed by UH Press.
Click on the banner to view a complete, searchable list of sale books—including the just-published new edition of Mary Sia’s Classic Chinese Cookbook and all of John DeFrancis’ popular dictionaries (ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, ABC Chinese-English Dictionary: Desk Reference Edition, ABC English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary)—and visit www.uhpress.hawaii.edu from Friday, February 8 (noon, HST) to Wednesday, February 13 (noon, HST). (Discount prices will not appear online until the sale begins.)
Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo, was named an Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association. The award was established in 1958 to recommend the most outstanding reference publications for small and medium-sized public and academic libraries. The selected titles are valuable reference resources and are highly recommended for inclusion in any library’s collection.
Japanese Philosophy was also recently recognized as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice Magazine:
“This massive tome will stand for the forseeable future as the gold standard for comprehensive treatment of all matters of Japanese philosophy. The three editors, all significant names within this small but growing subfield, have assembled an impressive group of established and up-and-coming scholars to translate and provide introductions to each entry, resulting in a readable sourcebook remarkable in both scope and acuity of analysis. . . . Essential.”
Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu, by Christina Laffin, explores the world of thirteenth-century Japan through the life of a prolific noblewoman known as Nun Abutsu (1225–1283). Abutsu crossed gender and genre barriers by writing the first career guide for Japanese noblewomen, the first female-authored poetry treatise, and the first poetic travelogue by a woman—all despite the increasingly limited social mobility for women during the Kamakura era (1185–1336). Capitalizing on her literary talent and political prowess, Abutsu rose from middling origins and single-motherhood to a prestigious marriage and membership in an esteemed literary lineage.
“Laffin draws on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English to create the most comprehensive picture we have to date of a remarkable woman who has been written out of the standard narratives of Japanese social, political, and literary history. This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of women in the complex interplay of power, poetry, and politics in medieval Japan.” —Rajyashree Pandey, Goldsmiths, University of London
January 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3565-1 / $49.00 (CLOTH)
A popular teaching that combined elements of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, folk beliefs, and Catholicism, Tonghak (Eastern Learning) is best known for its involvement in a rebellion that touched off the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and accelerated Japanese involvement in Korea. Through a careful reading of sources—including religious works and biographies many of which are translated and annotated here into English for the first time—Salvation through Dissent: Tonghak Heterodoxy and Early Modern Korea, by George L. Kallander, traces Tonghak’s rise amidst the debates over orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Choson Korea (1392–1910) and its impact on religious and political identity from 1860 to 1906. It argues that the teachings of founder Ch’oe Cheu (1824–1864) attracted a large following among rural Koreans by offering them spiritual and material promises to relieve conditions such as poverty and disease and provided consolation in a tense geo-political climate.
“In this refreshingly original study of Tonghak, Kallander dismantles some of the myths that have sprung up about Korea’s first indigenous organized religion. He situates Tonghak in its historical context, reading the earliest Tonghak texts the way they were meant to be read when they were first composed, rather than the way they have been interpreted by latter generations. Moreover, in a departure from much previous scholarship on Tonghak, he accurately analyzes Tonghak as more religious than political in origin. This work is a significant contribution to our understanding of both Korean religion and Korean history in the nineteenth century.” —Don Baker, University of British Columbia
Korean Classics Library: Philosophy and Religion
January 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3716-7 / $45.00 (CLOTH)
This collection, translated by Zeljko Cipris, introduces the work of Japan’s foremost Marxist writer, Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933), to an English-speaking audience, providing access to a vibrant, dramatic, politically engaged side of Japanese literature that is seldom seen outside Japan. The volume presents a new translation of Takiji’s fiercely anticapitalist Kani kosen—a classic that became a runaway bestseller in Japan in 2008, nearly eight decades after its 1929 publication. It also offers the first-ever translations of Yasuko and Life of a Party Member, two outstanding works that unforgettably explore both the costs and fulfillments of revolutionary activism for men and women. The book features a comprehensive introduction by Komori Yoichi, a prominent Takiji scholar and professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo University.
“A miracle happened in the world of Japanese letters in 2008: an eighty-year-old masterwork of Japanese proletarian literature appeared on best-seller lists. Embraced and reviled in its own day, dismissed and forgotten once revolution was declared both impossible and unnecessary, Kobayashi Takiji’s The Crab Cannery Ship, reborn here in zeljko Cipris’s fresh translation, stirred in Japanese a forgotten hunger for a literature that answers to bleak times with an incandescent anger and life-giving solidarity. This volume, which includes two novels never before translated, Yasuko and the Life of a Party Member, gives us a trio of works that speak to readers with prescient urgency.” —Norma Field, Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Japanese Studies, University of Chicago
January 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3742-6 / $25.00 (PAPER)
A 108-meter high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square in Hangzhou. A Chengdu residential complex for 200,000 recreates Dorchester, England. An ersatz Queen’s Guard patrols Shanghai’s Thames Town, where pubs and statues of Winston Churchill abound. Gleaming replicas of the White House dot Chinese cities from Fuyang to Shenzhen. These examples are but a sampling of China’s most popular and startling architectural movement: the construction of monumental themed communities that replicate towns and cities in the West.
Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, by Bianca Bosker, presents the first definitive chronicle of this remarkable phenomenon in which entire townships appear to have been airlifted from their historic and geographic foundations in Europe and the Americas, and spot-welded to Chinese cities. These copycat constructions are not theme parks but thriving communities where Chinese families raise children, cook dinners, and simulate the experiences of a pseudo-Orange County or Oxford. In recounting the untold and evolving story of China’s predilection for replicating the greatest architectural hits of the West, Bosker explores what this unprecedented experiment in “duplitecture” implies for the social, political, architectural, and commercial landscape of contemporary China.
“The postmodern predilection for ‘themed’ environments and simulacra has generally been interpreted, in a line that stretches from the Frankfurt School to Baudrillard and Eco, in terms of loss—loss of originality and loss of authenticity. Bianca Bosker turns this line of cultural criticism in a very different direction in a perceptive analysis of architectural mimicry in the cultural context of the ‘new China.’ Through significant and original research, including personal interviews and photographs, Bosker draws a vivid picture of a rapidly changing society in a moment in the self-definition of its wealthier elements. Original Copies will appeal both to specialists in contemporary Chinese studies and to a wider public curious about these arresting images of a consumer society in formation.” —Christian Hubert, Parsons The New School for Design
January 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3606-1 / $30.00 (PAPER)
Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture
Published in association with Hong Kong University Press
For more on China’s architectural mimicry:
Copycat Architects in China Take Aim at the Stars: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/pirated-copy-of-design-by-star-architect-hadid-being-built-in-china-a-874390.html
China’s Copycat Cities: http://uhpress.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/foreign-policy-article-on-chinas-copycat-cities/
Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and like Poe drew on his penchant for the grotesque and the bizarre to explore the boundaries of conventional thought. Best known as the founder of the modern Japanese detective novel, Ranpo wrote for a youthful audience, and a taste for playacting and theatre animates his stories. His writing is often associated with the era of ero guro nansense (erotic grotesque nonsense), which accompanied the rise of mass culture and mass media in urban Japan in the 1920s. Characterized by an almost lurid fascination with simulacra and illusion, the era’s sensibility permeates Ranpo’s first major work and one of his finest achievements, Strange Tale of Panorama Island (Panoramato kidan), published in 1926.
This first English translation of Panoramato kidan by Elaine Kazu Gerbert includes a critical introduction and notes and uncovers for English-language readers an important new dimension of an ever stimulating, provocative talent.
“Ranpo is already a hot commodity on the international literary and cultural scene, and Strange Tale of Panorama Island should find its way onto many a ‘modern Japan’ or ‘modern East Asia’ syllabus. Gerbert, one of the really gifted translators of her generation, provides a graceful, seductive rendering of a landscape that incubates horror, and a superb introduction to this metaphysical thriller—one of Ranpo’’s most significant works.” —Paul Anderer, Columbia University
January 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3703-7 / $17.00 (PAPER)
Each year Choice Magazine, the official publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, compiles a distinguished list of Outstanding Academic Titles. The following UH Press books were recognized for 2012. A complete list of titles will be available in Choice’s January 2013 issue.
Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook edited by James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo
“This massive tome will stand for the forseeable future as the gold standard for comprehensive treatment of all matters of Japanese philosophy. The three editors, all significant names within this small but growing subfield, have assembled an impressive group of established and up-and-coming scholars to translate and provide introductions to each entry, resulting in a readable sourcebook remarkable in both scope and acuity of analysis. . . . Essential.” —Choice (April 2012)
Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945-1954): An International and Interdisciplinary Approach by Christopher E. Goscha
“[This] very useful, high-quality publication is a valuable acquisition for all libraries with reference collections in modern Asian history. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice (August 2012)
Compassion is a word we use frequently but rarely precisely. One reason we lack a philosophically precise understanding of compassion is that moral philosophers today give it virtually no attention. Indeed, in the predominant ethical traditions of the West (deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics), compassion tends to be either passed over without remark or explicitly dismissed as irrelevant. And yet in the predominant ethical traditions of Asia, compassion is centrally important: All else revolves around it. This is clearly the case in Buddhist ethics, and compassion plays a similarly indispensable role in Confucian and Daoist ethics.
In Compassion and Moral Guidance, Steve Bein seeks to explain why compassion plays such a substantial role in the moral philosophies of East Asia and an insignificant one in those of Europe and the West.
Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monographs, No. 23
January 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3641-2 / $45.00 (CLOTH)
This is a thoroughly revised edition of Integrated Korean: Intermediate 2, the fourth volume of the best-selling series developed collaboratively by leading classroom teachers and linguists of Korean. All series’ volumes have been developed in accordance with performance-based principles and methodology—contextualization, learner-centeredness, use of authentic materials, usage-orientedness, balance between skill getting and skill using, and integration of speaking, listening, reading, writing, and culture. Grammar points are systematically introduced in simple but adequate explanations and abundant examples and exercises.
Audio files for this volume may be downloaded in MP3 format at http://www.kleartextbook.com.
KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language
December 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3813-3 / $35.00 (PAPER)
Published with the support of the Korea Foundation
