Reading the Fire engages America�s �first literatures,� traditional Native American tales and legends, as literary art and part of our collective imaginative heritage. This revised edition of a book first published to critical acclaim in 1983 includes four new essays.Drawing on ethnographic data and regional folklore, Jarold Ramsey moves from origin and trickster narratives and Indian ceremonial texts, into interpretations of stories from the Nez Perce, Clackamas Chinook, Coos, Wasco, and Tillamook repertories, concluding with a set of essays on the neglected subject of Native literary responses to contact with Euroamericans. In his finely worked, erudite analyses, he mediates between an author-centered, print-based narrative tradition and one that is oral, anonymous, and tribal, adducing parallels between Native texts and works by Shakespeare, Yeats, Beckett, and Faulkner.
Alaska, with its Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut heritage, its century of Russian colonization, its peoples� formidable struggles to wrest a living (or a fortune) from the North�s isolated and harsh environment, and its relatively recent achievement of statehood, has long captured the popular imagination. In An Alaska Anthology, twenty-five contemporary scholars explore the region�s pivotal events, significant themes, and major players, Native, Russian, Canadian, and American. The essays chosen for this anthology represent the very best writing on Alaska, giving great depth to our understanding and appreciation of its history from the days of Russian-American Company domination to the more recent threat of nuclear testing by the Atomic Energy Commission and the influence of oil money on inexperienced politicians. Readers may be familiar with an earlier anthology, Interpreting Alaska�s History, from which the present volume evolved to accommodate an explosion of research in the past decade. While a number of the original pieces were found to be irreplaceable, more than half of the essays are new. The result is a fresh perspective on the subject and an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and scholars.
The tales included here represent all of Yunnan Province�s officially designated ethnic minorities, and include creation myths, romances, historical legends, tales explaining natural phenomena, ghost stories, and festival tales. The tales are peopled by memorable characters, such as the Tibetan mother who, reborn as a cow, comforts and helps her daughter into her harsh life as a slave girl; the two Kucong sisters who marry snakes; and the bodiless Lahu �head-baby� who grows up to win one of the earth-god Poyana�s daughters in marriage. Chosen for their representativeness, aesthetic appeal, and variety, the stories provide rich examples of the folk traditions of Southwest China.South of the Clouds includes introductions and an appendix which describe the places and people of Yunnan, analyzethe literary and psychological characteristics of their stories, give the sources of the tales, and explain the methodolgy of collecting folk literature in China.
Advanced industrial nations face many difficult political and economic problems due to the accelerating pace and evolving character of technological change. In this volume, economists and political scientists discuss analytic and policy issues relating to the current state of technological capability in the United States, Japan, and Western Germany from a historical perspective and as a basis for future technological development. They also examine the problems and the issues involved in competition and cooperation among high technology firms and in evolving a more harmonious trade regime.The essays presented here explore from an international perspective the theoretical underpinnings of policy issues that are shaped by increasing internations competition and by the changing form and character of the international trade regime. Issues are discussed against the background of declining American technological dominance and intensifying competition as well as increasing international cooperation among high technology firms.Specific topics include the internationalization of basic research; the closing gap between basic and applied research; the effect of nation specific interfirm relations and various characteristics of labor markets on technological progress; and the effectiveness of various forms of government research and development assistance (or, more broadly, industrial policy). Three essays present overviews of the technological capability of and major policy issues faced by the United States, Japan, and Western Germany. Others raise major theoretical and policy issues from the perspectives of political science and economics, and address specific policy issues or groups of related issues.
The vivid imagination, robust humor, and profound sense of place of the Indians of Oregon are revealed in this anthology, which gathers together hitherto scattered and often inaccessible legends originally transcribed and translated by scholars such as Archie Phinney, Melville Jacobs, and Franz Boas.
Included in this volume are studies of the traditional leadership of the Yi dynasty as well as twentieth-century legislative, party, and bureaucratic leadership, and an evaluation of views of political leaders in South Korea, as well as two studies of the Communist system in North Korea.
Presented here are nine tales from the celebrated Ming dynasty Sanyan collection of vernacular stories compiled and edited by Feng Menglong (1574�1646), the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time in China. The stories he collected were pivotal to the development of Chinese vernacular fiction, and their importance in the Chinese literary canon and world literature has been compared to that of Boccaccio�s Decameron and the stories of One Thousand and One Nights.Peopled with scholars, emperors, ministers, generals, and a gallery of ordinary men and women in their everyday surroundings�merchants and artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, monks and nuns, servants and maids, thieves and imposters�the stories provide a vivid panorama of the bustling world of imperial China before the end of the Ming dynasty.The three volumes constituting the Sanyan set�Stories Old and New, Stories to Caution the World, and Stories to Awaken the World, each containing forty tales�have been translated in their entirety by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. The stories in this volume were selected for their popularity with American readers and their usefulness as texts in classes on Chinese and comparative literature. These unabridged translations include all the poetry that is scattered throughout the original stories, as well as Feng Menglong�s interlinear and marginal comments, which point out what seventeenth-century readers of the stories were being asked to appreciate.
�To me life and art are one and the same, for the key lies in one's knowledge of people and life. In art one is trying to express it in the simplest imaginative way, as in the art of past civilizations, for beauty and truth are the only two things which live timeless and ageless.� – Min� OkuboThis is the first book-length critical examination of the life and work of Min� Okubo (1912-2001), a pioneering Nisei artist, writer, and social activist who repeatedly defied conventional role expectations for women and for Japanese Americans over her seventy-year career. Okubo's landmark Citizen 13660 (first published in 1946) is the first and arguably best-known autobiographical narrative of the wartime Japanese American relocation and confinement experience.Born in Riverside, California, Okubo was incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II, first at the Tanforan Assembly Center in California and later at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. There she taught art and directed the production of a literary and art magazine. While in camp, Okubo documented her confinement experience by making hundreds of paintings and pen-and-ink sketches. These provided the material for Citizen 13660. Word of her talent spread to Fortune magazine, which hired her as an illustrator. Under the magazine's auspices, she was able to leave the camp and relocate to New York City, where she pursued her art over the next half century.This lovely and inviting book, lavishly illustrated with both color and halftone images, many of which have never before been reproduced, introduces readers to Okubo's oeuvre through a selection of her paintings, drawings, illustrations, and writings from different periods of her life. In addition, it contains tributes and essays on Okubo's career and legacy by specialists in the fields of art history, education, women's studies, literature, American political history, and ethnic studies, essays that illuminate the importance of her contributions to American arts and letters.Min� Okubo expands the sparse critical literature on Asian American women, as well as that on the Asian American experience in the eastern United States. It also serves as an excellent companion to Citizen 13660, providing critical tools and background to place Okubo's work in its historical and literary contexts.
Drawing on the remembrances of elders who were born in the early 1900s and saw the last masked Yup�ik dances before missionary efforts forced their decline, Agayuliyararput is a collection of first-person accounts of the rich culture surrounding Yup�ik masks. Stories by thirty-three elders from all over southwestern Alaska, presented in parallel Yup�ik and English texts, include a wealth of information about the creation and function of masks and the environment in which they flourished. The full-length, unannotated stories are complete with features of oral storytelling such as repetition and digression; the language of the English translation follows the Yup�ik idiom as closely as possible.Reminiscences about the cultural setting of masked dancing are grouped into chapters on the traditional Yup�ik ceremonial cycle, the use of masks, life in the qasgiq (communal men�s house), the supression and revival of masked dancing, maskmaking, and dance and song. Stories are grouped geographically, representing the Yukon, Kuskokwim, and coastal areas. The subjects of the stories and the masks made to accompany them are the Arctic animals, beings, and natural forces on which humans depended.This book will be treasured by the Yup�ik residents of southwestern Alaska and an international audience of linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, and art historians.
The first edition of Shaping Seattle Architecture , published in 1994, introduced readers to Seattle’s architects by showcasing the work of those who were instrumental in creating the region’s built environment. Twenty years later, the second edition updates and expands the original with new information and illustrations that provide an even richer exploration of Seattle architecture.The book begins with a revised introduction that brings the story of Seattle architecture into the twenty-first century and situates developments in Seattle building design within local and global contexts. The book’s fifty-four essays present richly illustrated profiles that describe the architects' careers, provide an overview of their major works, and explore their significance. Shaping Seattle Architecture celebrates a wide range of people who helped form the region's built environment. It provides updated information about many of the architects and firms profiled in the first edition. Four individuals newly included in this second edition are Edwin J. Ivey, a leading residential designer; Fred Bassetti, an important contributor to Northwest regional modernism; L. Jane Hastings, one of the region’s foremost women in architecture; and Richard Haag, founder of the landscape architecture program at the University of Washington and designer of Gas Works Park and the Bloedel Reserve.The book also includes essays on the buildings of the Coast Salish people, who inhabited Puget Sound prior to Euro-American settlement; the role that architects played in speculative housing developments before and after World War II; and the vernacular architecture built by nonprofessionals that makes up a portion of the fabric of the city. Shaping Seattle Architecture concludes with a substantial reference section, updated to reflect the last twenty years of research and publications. A locations appendix offers a geographic guide to surviving works. The research section directs interested readers to further resources, and the appendix “Additional Significant Seattle Architects” provides thumbnail sketches of nearly 250 important figures not included in the main text.