Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of “death,” poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from China’s continued self-identity as a “nation of poetry” (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within China’s media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule. As the first book to deal explicitly with the discourses and functioning of scenes within the Chinese cultural context, Verse Going Viral will be of value to students and scholars of Chinese literature, cultural studies, and media, as well as to general readers interested in China's dynamic cultural scenes.

This volume of fourteen essays explores Chinese poetic modernism in all its facets, from its origins in the 1920s through 21st century manifestations. Modernisms in the plural reflects the complexity of the ideas and forms which can be associated with this literary-historical term. The volume’s contributors take a variety of focus points, from literary groups such as “9 Leaves” or “Bamboo Hat,” to individuals such as modernist sonneteer Feng Zhi 冯至, or Taiwan experimentalist Xia Yu 夏宇 (Hsia Yü), and Hong Kong modernist Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉钧, to non-biographically oriented chapters concerning modernist language, poetry and visual art, among other issues. Collectively, the volume endeavors to present as complete a picture of modernist practice in Chinese poetry as possible.

Despite widespread consensus that China's digital revolution was sure to bring about massive democratic reforms, such changes have not come to pass. While scholars and policy makers alternate between predicting change and disparaging a stubbornly authoritarian regime, in this book Shaohua Guo demonstrates how this dichotomy misses the far more complex reality. The Evolution of the Chinese Internet traces the emergence and maturation of one of the most creative digital cultures in the world through four major technological platforms: the bulletin board system, the blog, the microblog, and WeChat. Guo transcends typical binaries of freedom and control, to argue that Chinese Internet culture displays a uniquely sophisticated interplay between multiple extremes, and that its vibrancy is dependent on these complex negotiations. In contrast to the flourishing of research findings on what is made invisible online, this book examines the driving mechanisms that grant visibility to particular kinds of user-generated content. Offering a systematic account of how and why an ingenious Internet culture has been able to thrive, Guo highlights the pivotal roles that media institutions, technological platforms, and creative practices of Chinese netizens have played in shaping culture on- and offline.

This book situates the Chinese acceptance of Japanese popular culture, specifically the intriguing and sometimes awkward relationship between the “idol” groups AKB48 and SNH48, within the broad context of nationalist ideology and international relations in East Asia. It aims to enhance the knowledge and understanding of the reader about contemporary East Asian cultural exchanges and nationalist expressions in concrete forms. Additionally, this book attempts to discover heretofore overlooked aspects of nationalism’s metamorphosis in both China and Japan and challenge the existing scholarly and popular understandings of nationalism. By interrogating the nationalism factor in popular culture in Chinese and Japanese contexts, this books concludes that popular culture fandom can both be a culprit in promoting hegemonic political ideologies and serve as a potential antidote.

Read and Be Changed For thousands of years, God's word has penetrated human hearts and transformed lives. So why does the Bible often collect dust on our shelves? Why don't we mine the wisdom filling its pages? Pastor James Merritt, author of the bestselling 52 Weeks with Jesus, invites you to view Scripture afresh and fall in love with the book that changes everything. These simple weekly readings will help you... gain a big-picture view of God's message to you apply practical life lessons from the Bible's stories and teachings discover more about your destiny—on earth and in eternity As you explore the lives of Israel's wisest kings, God's powerful prophets, and your amazing Savior, you'll see how every subject and story in Scripture paints a picture of God's plan for humanity—including the story God wants to write with you.

Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors, this landmark volume, edited by David Der-wei Wang, explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres, emphasizes Chinese authors’ influence on foreign writers as well as China’s receptivity to outside literary influences, and offers vibrant contrasting voices and points of view.

This volume sheds light on the social and cultural transformations that accompanied the Covid-19 crisis by looking at health and biopolitics from a philosophical and literary perspective. The biopolitical measures taken globally in response to the crisis have led to previously unheard-of restrictions in liberal societies, resulting in deep and potentially lasting transformations both in social structures and interpersonal relationships. Many researchers have addressed the Covid-19 crisis as a political or epidemiological challenge, but few have paid sufficient attention to the culturally specific reactions and cultural representations of the human beings at the centre of events. Literary analyses capture this human component and give insights into different reactions to, and protests against, the health-political measures addressing the crisis. This book puts the notion of biopolitics, first extensively theorised in the 1970s, to work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and uses literary case studies as starting points for discussions of contemporary politics, media, and legal and surveillance regimes. It brings together eleven scholars from six countries with the shared aim of combining literary and philosophical expertise to create a better understanding of the changes in society and political attitudes induced by the ongoing pandemic.

The extraordinary true story of the Stasi's poetry club: Stasiland and The Lives of Others crossed with Dead Poets Society.'A magnificent book . . . at once touching, exquisite, devastating and extraordinary.'PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West Street and The Ratline'A vivid, funny, and imperturbable portrait of Soviet Russia's most loyal satellite.'NELL ZINKBerlin, 1982. Morale is at rock bottom in East Germany as the spectre of an all-out nuclear war looms. The Ministry for State Security is hunting for creative new weapons in the war against the class enemy - and their solution is stranger than fiction. Rather than guns, tanks, or bombs, the Stasi develop a programme to fight capitalism through rhyme and verse, winning the culture war through poetry - and the result is the most bizarre book club in history.Consisting of a small group of spies, soldiers and border guards - some WW2 veterans, others schoolboy recruits - the 'Working Group of Writing Chekists' met monthly until the Wall fell. In a classroom adorned with portraits of Lenin, they wrote their own poetry and were taught verse, metre, and rhetoric by East German poet Uwe Berger. The regime hoped that poetry would sharpen the Stasi's 'party sword' by affirming the spies' belief in the words of Marx and Lenin, as well as strengthening the socialist faith of their comrades. But as the agents became steeped in poetry, revelling in its imaginative ambiguity, the result was the opposite. Rather than entrenching State ideology, they began to question it - and following a radical role reversal, the GDR's secret weapon dramatically backfired.Weaving unseen archival material and exclusive interviews with surviving members, Philip Oltermann reveals the incredible hidden story of a unique experiment: weaponising poetry for politics. Both a gripping true story and a parable about creativity in a surveillance state, this is history writing at its finest.

This wide-ranging Companion provides a vital overview of modern Chinese literature in different geopolitical areas, from the 1840s to now. It reviews major accomplishments of Chinese literary scholarship published in Chinese and English and brings attention to previously neglected, important areas. Offers the most thorough and concise coverage of modern Chinese literature to date, drawing attention to previously neglected areas such as late Qing, Sinophone, and ethnic minority literature Several chapters explore literature in relation to Sinophone geopolitics, regional culture, urban culture, visual culture, print media, and new media The introduction and two chapters furnish overviews of the institutional development of modern Chinese literature in Chinese and English scholarship since the mid-twentieth century Contributions from leading literary scholars in mainland China and Hong Kong add their voices to international scholarship

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.