Asian Studies

Forget Chineseness provides a critical interpretation of not only discourses of Chinese identity--Chineseness--but also of how they have reflected differences between "Chinese" societies, such as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, People's Republic of China, Singapore, and communities overseas.

Essential reading for students of Japanese society, An Introduction to Japanese Society now enters its third edition. Here, internationally renowned scholar, Yoshio Sugimoto, writes a sophisticated, yet highly readable and lucid text, using both English and Japanese sources to update and expand upon his original narrative.

Holding up for scrutiny the notion of conservation, Seeds of Control examines the roots of Japanese ideas about the Korean landscape, as well as the consequences and aftermath of Japanese approaches to Korea's "greenification." Drawing from sources in Japanese and Korean, Fedman writes colonized lands into Japanese environmental history, revealing a largely untold story of green imperialism in Asia.

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand the politics of this body of literature remains contested, in part because the defining characteristics of much early modern fiction--formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic and intertextual play, and heavy allusion to literary canon--can seem to hold social and political realities at arm's length.