Synopses & Reviews
Chinas dramatic transformation over the past fifteen years has drawn its share of attention and fear from the global community and world leaders. Far from the inward-looking days of the Cultural Revolution, modern China today is the worlds fourth largest economy, with a net product larger than that of France and the United Kingdom. And Chinas dynamism is by no means limited to its economy: enrollments in secondary and higher education are rapidly expanding, and new means of communication are vastly increasing information available to the Chinese public. In two decades, the Chinese government has also transformed its foreign relations—Beijing is now consulted on virtually every key development within the region. However, the Communist Party of China still dominates all aspects of political life. The Politburo is still self-selecting, Beijing chooses province governors, censorship is widespread, and treatment of dissidents remains harsh.
In China, leading experts provide an overview of the region, highlighting key issues as they developed in the Peoples Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Edited with an introduction by David B. H. Denoon, an authority on China, this volume of articles covers recent events and key issues in understanding this growing superpower. Organized into three thematic sections—foreign policy and national security, economic policy and social issues, and domestic politics and governance—the essays cover salient topics such as China's military power, de-communization, growing economic strength, nationalism, and the possibility for democracy. The volume also contains current maps as well as a “Recent Chronology of Events” which provides a decade's worth of information on the region, organized by year and by country.
Contributors: Liu Binyan, David B.H. Denoon, Bruce J. Dickson, June Teufel Dreyer, Michael Dutton, Elizabeth Economy, Barry Eichengreen, Edward Friedman, Dru C. Gladney, Paul H. B. Godwin, Merle Goldman, Richard Madsen, Barry Naughton, Lucian W. Pye, Tony Saich, David Shambaugh, Robert Sutter, Michael D. Swaine, and Tyrene White.
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“An excellent resource.”
)-(Library Journal),()
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“An excellent resource.”
-Library Journal,
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"A richly rewarding, insightful, and engaging study." -American Literary Realism,
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"Glass provides a novel, nuanced, and sound critical perspectives on the productive interaction of seemingly opposite forces: modernism and the mass market."-Choice,
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"Glass offers insightful readings of such books as Stein's Everybody's Autobiography(1937) and Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (1932)."-The Journal of American History,
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"A fascinating exploration of the relationship among modern authorial celebrity, the rise of the mass market, and the crisis of masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century. This crisply argued book unites sophisticated theoretical arguments about the changing shape of subjectivity in American culture with attentive literary readings and careful historical scholarship."-Janice Radway,Duke University
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"Provocatively and deftly tackles the question of literary celebrity in modern America. A smart and combelling book that has broken through the silence on literary celebrity, and it will serve as the foundation for other inquiries into this complex phenomenon."-The Hemingway Review,
Synopsis
The first comprehensive and systematic study of literary celebrity in the twentieth-century United States,
Authors Inc. focuses on the autobiographical work of Mark Twain, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. Through these classic American authors, Loren Glass reveals the degree to which literary modernism in the United States is inseparable from the mass cultural forces it opposed.
Chronicling the emergence of literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century up through its contemporary manifestations, Glass focuses on how individual authors themselves struggled with the conditions of mass cultural renown. Furthermore, by emphasizing the complex relation between masculinity and modernist authorship in the United States, the book provides a bracing new account of the psychosexual economy of the American profession of authorship.
By combining a socio-historical approach with a rhetorical analysis of the autobiographical work in which classic American writers attempted to intervene in the formation of their public personae, Authors Inc. offers a long overdue study of one of the most important, and neglected, aspects of modern American literature.
About the Author
David B. H. Denoon is Professor of Politics and Economics at New York University. He is the author of many books, including Real Reciprocity: Balancing U.S. Economic and Security Policies in the Pacific Basin and Ballistic Missile Defense in the Post-Cold War Era. He is a Contributing Editor to Current History.