Exotic Pleasures

Exotic Pleasures PDF

Author: Peter Carey

Publisher: University of Queensland Press(Australia)

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 9780702223228

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Originally published in 1980, this collection of ten short stories includes two of the author's best known: TThe Fat Man in History' (1974) and TWar Crimes' (1979). Winner of the Booker Prize, Miles Franklin and National Book Council awards, among others, Carey is the author of the novels TBliss' and TOscar and Lucinda'.

City of Lingering Splendor

City of Lingering Splendor PDF

Author: John Blofeld

Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Published: 2001-05-01

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1570626375

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In his early twenties, John Blofeld spent what he describes as "three exquisitely happy years" in Peking during the era of the last emperor, when the breathtaking greatness of China's ancient traditions was still everywhere evident. Arriving in 1934, he found a city imbued with the atmosphere of the recent imperial past and haunted by the powerful spirit of the late Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. He entered a world of magnificent palaces and temples of the Forbidden City, of lotus-covered lakes and lush pleasure-gardens, of bustling bazaars and peaceful bathhouses, and of "flower houses" with their beautiful young courtesans versed in the arts of pleasing men. With a novelists' command of detail and dialogue, Blofeld vividly re-creates the magic of these years and conveys to the reader his appreciation and nostalgia for a way of life long vanished.

Exotic Pleasures

Exotic Pleasures PDF

Author: Engelbert Kaempfer

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13:

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This intriguing book is the definitive English translation of a mainstay of the Latin-based culture of the Renaissance. Engelbert Kaempfer, referred to as "the Humboldt of the seventeenth century," was a German scholar and physician who devoted an entire decade to cultural and scientific explorations. Beginning in 1683 with his departure from Sweden, where he took a position as secretary to the Swedish Embassy, and ending with his arrival in Holland in 1693, Kaempfer traveled through Russia, Persia, Arabia, India, Java, Siam, and Japan. He published his master work, Amoenitates Exoticae, shortly before his death in 1716. This extensive work was divided into five fascicles: (1) the state of the Persian court; (2) historical and scientific reports and observations on various things; (3) curious scientific and medical observations; (4) botanical and historical reports concerning the cultivation of the date palm in Persia; and (5) Japanese plants. Kaempfer, a researcher in both the humanities and the sciences, insisted on the primacy of reason and scientific methodology, both of which find solid confirmation in this book, the third fascicle of the five-fascicle work. His chapters include information on Persian mummy, the dracunculus worm on the coast of the Persian Gulf, snake dances of Eastern India, Chinese acupuncture, the history of Japanese tea, and the magic spells of the Makassars. As one of the major contributions of its time, Kaempfer's detailed examinations, observations, and explanations offer insight and understanding into both cultural and historical contexts that would otherwise have been lost.

Fabulating Beauty

Fabulating Beauty PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 9401202745

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Peter Carey is one of Australia’s finest creative writers, much admired by both literary critics and a worldwide reading public. While academia has been quick to see his fictions as exemplars of postcolonial and postmodern writing strategies, his general readership has been captivated by his deadpan sense of humour, his quirky characters, the outlandish settings and the grotesqueries of his intricate plots. After three decades of prolific writing and multiple award-winning, Carey stands out in the world of Australian letters as designated heir to Patrick White. Fabulating Beauty pays tribute to Carey’s literary achievement. It brings together the voices of many of the most renowned Carey critics in twenty essays (sixteen commissioned especially for this volume), an interview with the author, as well as the most extensive bibliography of Carey criticism to date. The studies represent a wide range of current perspectives on the writer’s fictions. Contributors focus on issues as diverse as the writer’s biography; his use of architectural metaphors; his interrogation of narrative structures such as myths and cultural master-plots; intertextual strategies; concepts of sacredness and references to the Christian tradition; and his strategies of rewriting history. Amidst predictions of the imminent death of ‘postist’ theory, the essays all attest to the ongoing relevance of the critical parameters framed by postmodernism and postcolonialism.

Inventing Exoticism

Inventing Exoticism PDF

Author: Benjamin Schmidt

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-02-09

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0812246462

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As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. The shapes and meanings of the extraordinary global images that emerged from this process form the subject of this highly original and richly textured study of cultural geography. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism. Illustrated with more than two hundred images of engravings, paintings, ceramics, and more, Inventing Exoticism shows, in vivid example and persuasive detail, how Europeans came to see and understand the world at an especially critical juncture of imperial imagination. At the turn to the eighteenth century, European markets were flooded by books and artifacts that described or otherwise evoked non-European realms: histories and ethnographies of overseas kingdoms, travel narratives and decorative maps, lavishly produced tomes illustrating foreign flora and fauna, and numerous decorative objects in the styles of distant cultures. Inventing Exoticism meticulously analyzes these, while further identifying the particular role of the Dutch—"Carryers of the World," as Defoe famously called them—in the business of exotica. The form of early modern exoticism that sold so well, as this book shows, originated not with expansion-minded imperialists of London and Paris, but in the canny ateliers of Holland. By scrutinizing these materials from the perspectives of both producers and consumers—and paying close attention to processes of cultural mediation—Inventing Exoticism interrogates traditional postcolonial theories of knowledge and power. It proposes a wholly revisionist understanding of geography in a pivotal age of expansion and offers a crucial historical perspective on our own global culture as it engages in a media-saturated world.

Peter Carey

Peter Carey PDF

Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2010-03-10

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0786455721

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Peter Carey, writer of such celebrated works as Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang, and His Illegal Self, is one of Australia's most critically acclaimed novelists. Deeply concerned with South Pacific culture, especially the lives of its most downtrodden citizens, Carey uses popular art as a tool for raising the consciousness of readers. This book provides an introduction to the author's life, as well as a guided overview of his body of work. Designed for the fan and scholar alike, this text features an alphabetized, fully-annotated listing of major terms in the Carey canon, including fictional characters, motifs, historical events, and themes. Additional features include a listing of headwords, a Carey history, 44 reading and writing topics, and bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. A comprehensive index is included.

The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology

The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology PDF

Author: James Stanescu

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-10-26

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1498538312

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The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology provides an introduction to the controversial treatment and ongoing violence routinely utilized against non-native species. Drawing from the tradition of critical animal scholars, Stanescu and Cummings have assembled a group of advocates who argue for a different kind of relationship with foreign species. Where contemporary approaches often emphasize the need to eradicate ecological invaders in order to preserve delicate habitats, the essays in this volume aim to reformulate the debate by arguing for an alternative approach that advances the possibility of an ethics of co-habitation.