Resistant Structures

Based on a close reading of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s extant films, this book provides insights into the ways the director created narrative structures and used symbolism to construct meaning in his films. Against critics’ insistence that Ozu was indifferent to plot and unlikely to use symbols, Geist demonstrates otherwise, revealing the director’s subtle iconographic paradigms. Her incisive understanding of the historical and cultural context in which the films were conceived amplifies her analysis of the films’ structure and meaning. Ozu: A Closer Look guides the reader through Ozu’s early, silent films and his sound films made during Japan’s wars in Asia and the subsequent American Occupation, then takes up specific themes relevant to his later, better-known films. These themes include religion, gender, and the influence of traditional Japanese painting. Geist also examines the impact that Ozu’s films had on specific directors in Europe, America, and Japan. Intended for film

In Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271–1368, Leqi Yu has conducted comprehensive research on jiehua or ruled-line painting, a unique painting genre in fourteenth-century China. This genre relies on tools such as rulers to represent architectural details and structures accurately. Such technical consideration and mechanical perfection linked this painting category with the builder’s art, which led to Chinese elites’ belittlement and won Mongol patrons’ admiration. Yu suggests that painters in the Yuan dynasty made new efforts towards a unique modular system and an unsurpassable plain-drawing tradition. She argues that these two strategies made architectural paintings in the Yuan dynasty entirely different from their predecessors, as well as making the art form extremely difficult for subsequent painters to imitate.

At the end of the nineteenth century a slice of imperial China was abruptly incorporated into the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. It became known as the New Territories.The people of this remote an

Portrait of a Community: Society, Culture, and the Structures of Kinship in the Mulan River Valley (Fujian) from the late Tang through the Song is a study of emerging kinship structures as embedded in

The main objective of this book is to familiarize the reader with a subset of the learning difficulties and common errors in ESL/EFL pronunciation and lexico-grammatical structures encountered by Chin

Public service reform, or public sector reform, has been a hot topic among political scientists in recent years as most existing government structures are inadequate to cope with the ever-changing env

Public service reform, or public sector reform, has been a hot topic among political scientists in recent years as most existing government structures are inadequate to cope with the ever-changing env

Moving world-systems analysis into the cultural realm, Richard E. Lee locates the cultural studies movement within a broad historical and geopolitical framework. He illuminates how order and conflict