columbia encyclopedia

This extraordinary one-volume guide to the modern literatures of China, Japan, and Korea is the definitive reference work on the subject in the English language. With more than one hundred articles that show how a host of authors and literary movements have contributed to the general literary development of their respective countries, this companion is an essential starting point for the study of East Asian literatures. Comprehensive thematic essays introduce each geographical section with historical overviews and surveys of persistent themes in the literature examined, including nationalism, gender, family relations, and sexuality.

Following the thematic essays are the individual entries: over forty for China, over fifty for Japan, and almost thirty for Korea, featuring everything from detailed analyses of the works of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and Murakami Haruki, to far-ranging explorations of avant-garde fiction in China and postwar novels in Korea. Arrayed chronologically, each entry is self-contained, though extensive cross-referencing affords readers the opportunity to gain a more synoptic view of the work, author, or movement. The unrivaled opportunities for comparative analysis alone make this unique companion an indispensable reference for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of Asian literature.

Although the literatures of China, Japan, and Korea are each allotted separate sections, the editors constantly kept an eye open to those writers, works, and movements that transcend national boundaries. This includes, for example, Chinese authors who lived and wrote in Japan; Japanese authors who wrote in classical Chinese; and Korean authors who write in Japanese, whether under the colonial occupation or because they are resident in Japan. The waves of modernization can be seen as reaching each of these countries in a staggered fashion, with eddies and back-flows between them then complicating the picture further. This volume provides a vivid sense of this dynamic interplay.

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Two of Virginia Woolf’s most influential works reveal the quintessence of her experimentation with narrative technique in depicting the passage of time and the nature of human consciousness. This guide includes an outline of the critical reception of Woolf’s work as well as extracts from her own writing on these novels and an exploration of the birth of “Woolf studies” in the mid-twentieth century.

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Ranging over the globe and over the centuries, here is a sparkling collection of over 6,000 remarks and witticisms, judgements and observations on all the topics you are likely to want a quotation on. The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations contains surprises of pithy wit, asides of originality and insight, as well as phrases chosen simply for the elegance and evocativeness of their expression.

Love and marriage, death and religion, food and drunkenness: all the eternal concerns are here- as well as a host of issues more particular to our time. As varied as the topics they comment on are the people the editor has found as his sources- from Aristotle to Mae West, from St. Augustine to Oscar Wilde, from Budha to Virginia Woolf.

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In this expertly crafted, richly detailed guide, Raymond Leslie Williams explores the cultural, political, and historical events that have shaped the Latin American and Caribbean novel since the end of World War II. In addition to works originally composed in English, Williams covers novels written in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Haitian Creole, and traces the profound influence of modernization, revolution, and democratization on the writing of this era.

Beginning in 1945, Williams introduces major trends by region, including the Caribbean and U.S. Latino novel, the Mexican and Central American novel, the Andean novel, the Southern Cone novel, and the novel of Brazil. He discusses the rise of the modernist novel in the 1940s, led by Jorge Luis Borges’s reaffirmation of the right of invention, and covers the advent of the postmodern generation of the 1990s in Brazil, the Generation of the “Crack” in Mexico, and the McOndo generation in other parts of Latin America.

An alphabetical guide offers biographies of authors, coverage of major topics, and brief introductions to individual novels. It also addresses such areas as women’s writing, Afro-Latin American writing, and magic realism. The guide’s final section includes an annotated bibliography of introductory studies on the Latin American and Caribbean novel, national literary traditions, and the work of individual authors. From early attempts to synthesize postcolonial concerns with modernist aesthetics to the current focus on urban violence and globalization, The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945 presents a comprehensive, accessible portrait of a thoroughly diverse and complex branch of world literature.

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The second edition of The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Collected and Selected Works greatly expands the range of one of the oldest continuously published reference works in the United States. Granger’s performs a valuable service for librarians by helping people locate poems when they have limited information about them, and by helping them locate poems by author or by the subjects they are interested in. Each edition of Granger’s includes title, first line, author, and subject indexes for over 300 poetry collected and selected works on library shelves.

In total, the second edition includes 315 works, by 266 different poets, locating more than 65,000 poems by title, first line, author, and subject. Included in this edition are the works of many of the major American and British poets of the last thirty years, such as Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon; important twentieth-century American poets, such as Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Penn Warren; twentieth-century foreign poets in new translations, such as Eugenio Montale and Paul Celan; and diverse poets from all times and places, collected in new editions, such as Cold Mountain, Jones Very, and Guido Cavalcanti. An expanded Subject Index contains more than 4,400 subjects, including many new subjects relating to specific people, places, or events from the history and culture of the twentieth century. Langston Hughes’s poems on the Scottsboro case and the Spanish Civil War are as easy to find as Wallace Steven’s poems about perception and Yusef Komunyakaa’s poems about jazz.

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