He was small and scared, and what he saw was a terrible thing. The girl was being bullied by a group of kids. He wanted to help, but what could he do? Stay afraid or be a hero?

According to Thompson, when the final accounting is done one day, mankind will learn that God's "hidden heroes" on Earth far outnumbered the famous men and women whose names are more easily recognizable.

The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature consists of 35 chapters written by leaders in the field, who explore significant topics and who have pioneered innovative approaches. The collection highlights the most dynamic current scholarship on Korean literature, presenting rigorous literary analysis, interdisciplinary methodologies, and transregional thinking so as to provide a valuable and inspiring resource for researchers and students alike. This Companion has particular significance as the most extensive collection to date of English-language articles on Korean literature; it both offers a thorough intellectual engagement with current scholarship and addresses a broad range of topics and time periods, from premodern to contemporary. It will contribute to an understanding of literature as part of a broad sociocultural process that aims to put the field into conversation with other fields of study in the humanities and social sciences. While presenting rigorous and innovative academic research that will be useful to graduate students and researchers, the chapters in the collection are written to be accessible to the average upper-level undergraduate student and include only minimal use of academic jargon. In an effort to provide substantially helpful material for researching, teaching, and learning Korean literature, this Companion includes as an appendix an extensive list of English translations of Korean literature.

While the customary path to achievement in traditional China was through service to the state, from the earliest times certain individuals had been acclaimed for repudiating an official career. This book traces the formulation and portrayal of the practice of reclusion in China from the earliest times through the sixth century, by which time reclusion had taken on its enduring character. Those men who decided to withhold their service to state governance fit the dictum from the Book of Changes of a man who "does not serve a king or lord; he elevates in priority his own affairs." This characterization came to serve as a byword of individual and voluntary withdrawal, the image of the man whose lofty resolve could not be humbled for service to a temporal ruler. Men who eschewed official appointments in favor of pursuing their own personal ideals were known by such appellations as "hidden men" (yinshi), "disengaged persons" (yimin), "high-minded men" (gaoshi), and "scholars-at-home" (chushi). What distinguished these men was a particular strength of character that underlay their conduct: they received approbation for maintaining their resolve, their mettle, their integrity, and their moral and personal values in the face of adversity, threat, or temptation. This book reveals that those who opted for a life of reclusion had a variety of motivations for their decisions and conducted widely divergent ways of life. The lives of these men epitomize the distinctive nature of substantive reclusion, differentiating them from those of the intelligentsia who, on occasion, voiced their desire for disengagement or for retreat, but who nevertheless found or retained their places in government office. Throughout, the author places the recluse and reclusion within the social, political, intellectual, religious, and literary contexts of the times.

This is an interdisciplinary collection of articles analyzing seven classic premodern Chinese texts that are provided in translation.

Life in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 1980s is bleak and controlled. The oppressive Communist regime bears down on all aspects of people’s lives much like the granite sky overhead. In the crumbling old building that hosts the Sofia Music School for the Gifted, inflexible and unsentimental apparatchiks drill the students like soldiers—as if the music they are teaching did not have the power to set these young souls on fire. Fifteen-year-old Konstantin is a brash, brilliant pianist of exceptional sensitivity, struggling toward adulthood in a society where honest expression often comes at a terrible cost. Confined to the Music School for most of each day and a good part of the night, Konstantin exults in his small rebellions—smoking, drinking, and mocking Party pomp and cant at every opportunity. Intelligent and arrogant, funny and despairing, compassionate and cruel, he is driven simultaneously by a desire to be the best and an almost irresistible urge to fail. His isolation, buttressed by the grim conventions of a loveless society, prevents him from getting close to the mercurial violin virtuoso Irina, but also from understanding himself. Through it all, Konstantin plays the piano with inflamed passion: he is transported by unparalleled explorations of Chopin, Debussy, and Bach, even as he is cursed by his teachers’ numbing efforts at mind control. Each challenging piano piece takes on a life of its own, engendering exquisite new revelations. A refuge from a reality Konstantin detests, the piano is also what tethers him to it. Yet if he can only truly master this grandest of instruments—as well as his own self-destructive urges—it might just secure his passage out of this broken country. Nikolai Grozni—himself a native of Bulgaria and a world-class pianist in his youth—sets this electrifying portrait of adolescent longing and anxiety against a backdrop of tumultuous, historic world events. Hypnotic and headlong, Wunderkind gives us a stunningly urgent, acutely observed, and wonderfully tragicomic glimpse behind the Iron Curtain at the very end of the Cold War, reminding us of the sometimes life-saving grace of great music.