In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “Development is the only hard imperative.” What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People’s Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction. In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew F. Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century, with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer into Chinese letters. He traces the ways that the evolutionary narrative itself evolved into a form of vernacular knowledge which dissolved the boundaries between beast and man and reframed childhood development as a recapitulation of civilizational ascent, through which a beleaguered China might struggle for existence and claim a place in the modern world-system. This narrative left an indelible imprint on China’s literature and popular media, from children’s primers to print culture, from fairy tales to filmmaking. Jones’s analysis offers an innovative and interdisciplinary angle of vision on China’s cultural evolution. He focuses especially on China’s foremost modern writer and public intellectual, Lu Xun, in whose work the fierce contradictions of his generation’s developmentalist aspirations became the stuff of pedagogical parable. Developmental Fairy Tales revises our understanding of literature’s role in the making of modern China by revising our understanding of developmentalism’s role in modern Chinese literature.
In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, "Development is the only hard imperative." What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People's Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction. In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth century, with the translation of the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer into Chinese letters. He traces the ways that the evolutionary narrative itself evolved into a form of vernacular knowledge which dissolved the boundaries between beast and man and reframed childhood development as a recapitulation of civilizational ascent, through which a beleaguered China might struggle for existence and claim a place in the modern world-system. This narrative left an indelible imprint on China's literature and popular media, from children's primers to print culture, from fairy tales to filmmaking. Jones's analysis offers an innovative and interdisciplinary angle of vision on China's cultural evolution. He focuses especially on China's foremost modern writer and public intellectual, Lu Xun, in whose work the fierce contradictions of his generation's developmentalist aspirations became the stuff of pedagogical parable. Developmental Fairy Tales revises our understanding of literature's role in the making of modern China by revising our understanding of developmentalism's role in modern Chinese literature.
Shifting Stories explores the tale literature of eighth- and ninth-century China to show how the written tales we have today grew out of a fluid culture of hearsay that circulated within elite society. Sarah M. Allen focuses on two main types of tales, those based in gossip about recognizable public figures and those developed out of lore concerning the occult. She demonstrates how writers borrowed and adapted stories and plots already in circulation and how they transformed them—in some instances into unique and artfully wrought tales. For most readers of that era, tales remained open texts, subject to revision by many hands over the course of transmission, unconstrained by considerations of textual integrity or authorship. Only in the mid- to late-ninth century did some readers and editors come to see the particular wording and authorship of a tale as important, a shift that ultimately led to the formation of the Tang tale canon as it is envisioned today.
A CBC BOOKS BEST NONFICTION OF 2020 AN ENTROPY MAGAZINE BEST NONFICTION 2020/21 A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK OF THE DAY (07/23/2022) Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty? If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference. "Historically we have associated the disabled body image and disabled life with an unhappy ending” – Sue Carter, Toronto Star "Leduc persuasively illustrates the power of stories to affect reality in this painstakingly researched and provocative study that invites us to consider our favorite folktales from another angle." – Sara Shreve, Library Journal "She [Leduc] argues that template is how society continues to treat the disabled: rather than making the world accessible for everyone, the disabled are often asked to adapt to inaccessible environments." – Ryan Porter, Quill & Quire "Read this smart, tenacious book." – The Washington Post "A brilliant young critic named Amanda Leduc explores this pernicious power of language in her new book, Disfigured … Leduc follows the bread crumbs back into her original experience with fairy tales – and then explores their residual effects … Read this smart, tenacious book." – The Washington Post "Leduc investigates the intersection between disability and her beloved fairy tales, questioning the constructs of these stories and where her place is, as a disabled woman, among those narratives." – The Globe and Mail "It gave me goosebumps as I read, to see so many of my unexpressed, half-formed thoughts in print. My highlighter got a good workout." – BookRiot "Disfigured is not just an eye-opener when it comes to the Disney princess crew and the Marvel universe – this thin volume provides the tools to change how readers engage with other kinds of popular media, from horror films to fashion magazines to outdated sitcom jokes." – Quill & Quire “It’s an essential read for anyone who loves fairy tales.” – Buzzfeed Books "Leduc makes one thing clear and beautifully so – fairy tales are fundamentally fantastic, but that doesn’t mean that they are beyond reproach in their depiction of real issues and identities." – Shrapnel Magazine "As Leduc takes us through these fairy tales and the space they occupy in the narratives that we construct, she slowly unfolds a call-to-action: the claiming of space for disability in storytelling." – The Globe and Mail "A provocative beginning to a thoughtful and wide-ranging book, one which explores some of the most primal stories readers have encountered and prompts them to ponder the subtext situated there all along." – LitHub "a poignant and informative account of how the stories we tell shape our collective understanding of one another.” – BookMarks "What happens when we allow disabled writers to tell stories of disability within fairytales and in magical and supernatural settings? It is a reimagining of the fairytale canon we need. Leduc dares to dream of a world that most stories envision is unattainable." – Bitch Media
The rise of youth is among the most dramatic stories of modern China. Since the last years of the Qing dynasty, youth has been made a new agent of history in Chinese intellectuals’ visions of national rejuvenation through such tremendously popular notions as “young China” and “new youth.” The characterization of a young protagonist with a developmental story has also shaped the modern Chinese novel. Young China takes youth as a central literary motif that was profoundly related to the ideas of nationhood and modernity in twentieth-century China. A synthesis of narrative theory and cultural history, it combines historical investigations of the origin and development of the modern Chinese youth discourse with close analyses of the novelistic construction of the Chinese Bildungsroman, which depicts the psychological growth of youth with a symbolic allusion to national rejuvenation. Negotiating between self and society, ideal and action, and form and reality, such a narrative manifests as well as complicates the various political and cultural symbolisms invested in youth through different periods of modern Chinese history. In this story of young China, the restless, elusive, and protean image of youth both perpetuates and problematizes the ideals of national rejuvenation.
The importance of the rich corpus of “Masters Literature” that developed in early China since the fifth century BCE has long been recognized. But just what are these texts? Scholars have often approached them as philosophy, but these writings have also been studied as literature, history, and anthropological, religious, and paleographic records. How should we translate these texts for our times? This book explores these questions through close readings of seven examples of Masters Literature and asks what proponents of a “Chinese philosophy” gained by creating a Chinese equivalent of philosophy and what we might gain by approaching these texts through other disciplines, questions, and concerns. What happens when we remove the accrued disciplinary and conceptual baggage from the Masters Texts? What neglected problems, concepts, and strategies come to light? And can those concepts and strategies help us see the history of philosophy in a different light and engender new approaches to philosophical and intellectual inquiry? By historicizing the notion of Chinese philosophy, we can, the author contends, answer not only the question of whether there is a Chinese philosophy but also the more interesting question of the future of philosophical thought around the world.
Winner of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award "A charming book about enchantment, a profound book about fairy tales."—John Updike, The New York Times Book Review Bruno Bettelheim was one of the great child psychologists of the twentieth century and perhaps none of his books has been more influential than this revelatory study of fairy tales and their universal importance in understanding childhood development. Analyzing a wide range of traditional stories, from the tales of Sindbad to “The Three Little Pigs,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” Bettelheim shows how the fantastical, sometimes cruel, but always deeply significant narrative strands of the classic fairy tales can aid in our greatest human task, that of finding meaning for one’s life.
Literature, from the Chinese perspective, makes manifest the cosmic patterns that shape and complete the world—a process of “worlding” that is much more than mere representation. In that spirit, A New Literary History of Modern China looks beyond state-sanctioned works and official narratives to reveal China as it has seldom been seen before, through a rich spectrum of writings covering Chinese literature from the late-seventeenth century to the present. Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors from throughout the world, this landmark volume explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres—pop song lyrics and presidential speeches, political treatises and prison-house jottings, to name just a few. Major figures such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and Mo Yan appear in a new light, while lesser-known works illuminate turning points in recent history with unexpected clarity and force. Many essays emphasize Chinese authors’ influence on foreign writers as well as China’s receptivity to outside literary influences. Contemporary works that engage with ethnic minorities and environmental issues take their place in the critical discussion, alongside writers who embraced Chinese traditions and others who resisted. Writers’ assessments of the popularity of translated foreign-language classics and avant-garde subjects refute the notion of China as an insular and inward-looking culture. A vibrant collection of contrasting voices and points of view, A New Literary History of Modern China is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of China’s literary and cultural legacy.
Chinese martial arts novels from the late nineteenth century are filled with a host of suggestive sounds. Characters cuss and curse in colorful dialect accents, vendor calls ring out from bustling marketplaces, and martial arts action scenes come to life with the loud clash of swords and the sounds of bodies colliding. What is the purpose of these sounds, and what is their history? In Sound Rising from the Paper, Paize Keulemans answers these questions by critically reexamining the relationship between martial arts novels published in the final decades of the nineteenth century and earlier storyteller manuscripts. He finds that by incorporating, imitating, and sometimes inventing storyteller sounds, these novels turned the text from a silent object into a lively simulacrum of festival atmosphere, thereby transforming the solitary act of reading into the communal sharing of an oral performance. By focusing on the role sound played in late nineteenth-century martial arts fiction, Keulemans offers alternatives to the visual models that have dominated our approach to the study of print culture, the commercialization of textual production, and the construction of the modern reading subject.
In our distant childhood, mothers and grandmothers told us fairy tales, not suspecting, perhaps, that by doing so they used one of the most effective methods of psychological correction – fairy-tale therapy. A fairy tale is a means of introducing a child to the world of human destinies, to history; this is the «golden key» to changing the environment, its creative, constructive transformation. The child half lives in an imaginary, unreal world, and not just lives, but actively acts in it, rebuilding it and himself. It is from this treasury that he draws information about the reality that he does not yet know, the features of the future, about which he still does not know how to think [12]. Surprisingly simple, but at the same time instructive stories were breathtaking, plunging the world of dragons, woodpeckers, brownies, beautiful princesses and evil witches. Are these simple stories simple, as it seems at first glance? Is it just an entertainment tool or a universal educational program that helps children to settle in this difficult world? The process of fairy tale therapy allows the child to actualize and realize his problems, as well as to see different ways to solve them [12, p. 84]. A fairy tale metaphor, due to its inherent special properties, turns out to be a way of building mutual understanding between children, an attitude towards oneself as an individual. In fairy tales you can find a complete list of human problems and ways to solve them. Fairy stories contain information about the dynamics of life processes. Therefore, a fairy tale can give a symbolic warning about how the situation will develop, which is important in corrective work [118, p. 35]. K.I.Chukovsky believed that the purpose of a fairy tale «is to educate a child in humanity – this marvelous ability to worry about other people's misfortunes, to rejoice in the joys of another, to experience someone else's fate as one's own. After all, a fairy tale improves, enriches and humanizes the child's psyche, since a child listening to a fairy tale feels like an active participant in it and always identifies with those of its characters who fight for justice, goodness, and freedom». A fairy tale is a means of working with the inner world of a child, surprising in terms of the strength of its psychological impact, a powerful tool for development. It is the psychological content of fairy tales, the symbolic reflection of psychological phenomena that make folk tales an indispensable tool for influencing a person [12]. A school psychologist constantly asks himself two questions: «What? » and «How?». In the sense that every day, in the case of providing psychological assistance to a child, a specialist tries to figure out what is actually happening and how to help a small client overcome the difficulties that have arisen. Searching for the answer to the question «what? » are carried out with the help of various methods of psychodiagnostics, observation, conversations with parents and teachers, etc. But when the answer to the first question becomes more or less clear, the question «how? » arises with all its cast-iron simplicity and inaccessibility. At this stage, many school psychologists, unfortunately, give in, because it is necessary to move from diagnostics to full of surprises and risk, the path of psychocorrection and psychotherapy. The enrichment of practical psychology with new means of effective work with children, provided, in particular, by such a direction as fairy tale therapy, is a gratifying fact of the last decade. Now to the notorious question «how? » found one of the beautiful and effective answers. The developing and psychotherapeutic potential of fairy tales, for all its obviousness, was not used enough by the practical psychology of education. But fairy tale therapy is effective in working not only with preschoolers or younger students, but also with teenagers and high school students. Moreover, there are psychotherapeutic fairy tales for teachers. Even a simple reading of fairy tales (especially specially created ones) gives an amazing effect and helps a person overcome various life difficulties. Fairy tales are important to child development, both educationally and psychologically, and have been shown to be therapeutically efficacious. O.Breusenko-Kuznetsov, G.Nyzhnyk, D.Sokolov, L.Terletska, N.Tsybulya and others are developing the method of fairy tale therapy in Ukraine. Studies by L.S. Vygotsky, O.V. Zaporozhets, N.S. Karpinskaya showed that a fairy tale is vital to a child, and it is a means for him to know the world around him and himself. In recent literature, fairy tales are often the object the study attracts the attention of representatives of various schools and branches of science, in particular folklorists, literary critics, psychologists, etc. A fairy tale needs a thorough new look using effective tools. In in this regard, the study of issues related to the analysis of fairy tales as a psycho-corrective method of psychological assistance to preschoolers in terms of psychological and pedagogical aspects is appropriate. The research of the above experts is about the possibility use of the method of fairy tale therapy not only in psychological, but also in pedagogical practice for didactic and developmental purposes. As for application of this method in the professional activities of a psychologist, the research on this subject is just beginning to appear on the pages scientific publications. Yes, the possibility and feasibility of using fairy tale therapy in socio-pedagogical practice indicate S. Savchenko, O. Ivanovska, N. Shkarin and others, who consider the fairy tale as a wonderful social pedagogical means of socialization, development and education of personality. At the present stage of development of education the problem of increasing the number of children with behavioral disorders and, accordingly, the problem of preventing and overcoming school non-adaptation, manifested in low performance, deviations from norms of behavior, difficulties in relationships with others. Central in the correctional education of schoolchildren is the optimization of children's activities. The method of fairy tale therapy allows solving a number of problems that arise in children of different ages. The process of fairy tale therapy allows the child to actualize and realize their problems, as well as see different ways to solve them.
