There is growing interest in social transformation in contemporary China, with much work published on the subject. This book is different from other books in that it presents an overview of the work of Chinese sociologists on how Chinese society is changing. It reports on a great deal of original research by leading, outstanding Chinese scholars, including extensive fieldwork and large-scale social change survey data, and covers comprehensively the full range of aspects of the subject. It assesses developments since the beginning of reform in China, and provides, overall, a comprehensive understanding of China's social development and of the likely impact of future social changes on China.

In Belated Travelers, Ali Behdad offers a compelling cultural critique of nineteenth-century travel writing and its dynamic function in European colonialism. Arriving too late to the Orient, at a time when tourism and colonialism had already turned the exotic into the familiar, late nineteenth-century European travelers to the Middle East experienced a sense of belatedness, of having missed the authentic experience once offered by a world that was already disappearing. Behdad argues that this nostalgic desire for the other contains an implicit critique of Western superiority, a split within European discourses of otherness. Working from these insights and using analyses of power derived from Foucault, Behdad engages in a new critique of orientalism. No longer viewed as a coherent and unified phenomenon or a single developmental tradition, it is seen as a complex and shifting field of practices that has relied upon its own ambivalence and moments of discontinuity to ensure and maintain its power as a discourse of dominance. Through readings of Flaubert, Nerval, Kipling, Blunt, and Eberhardt, and following the transition in travel literature from travelog to tourist guide, Belated Travelers addresses the specific historical conditions of late nineteenth-century orientalism implicated in the discourses of desire and power. Behdad also views a broad range of issues in addition to nostalgia and tourism, including transvestism and melancholia, to specifically demonstrate the ways in which the heterogeneity of orientalism and the plurality of its practice is an enabling force in the production and transformation of colonial power. An exceptional work that provides an important critique of issues at the forefront of critical practice today, Belated Travelers will be eagerly awaited by specialists in nineteenth-century British and French literatures, and all concerned with colonial and post-colonial discourse.

How has a game brought together Americans and defined separate ethnic communities? This book tells the first history of mahjong and its meaning in American culture. Click-click-click. The sound of mahjong tiles connects American expatriates in Shanghai, Jazz Age white Americans, urban Chinese Americans in the 1930s, incarcerated Japanese Americans in wartime, Jewish American suburban mothers, and Air Force officers' wives in the postwar era. Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. This mass-produced game crossed the Pacific, creating waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Annelise Heinz narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women's culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American game. Heinz also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game to gain access to respectable leisure. The result was the forging of friendships that lasted decades and the creation of organizations that raised funds for the war effort and philanthropy. No other game has signified both belonging and standing apart in American culture. Drawing on photographs, advertising, popular media, and dozens of oral histories, Heinz's rich and colorful account offers the first history of the wildly popular game of mahjong.

Essays on the Wilhelm Meister novels, Faust, Goethe's early plays, Schiller's Räuber and on Goethe's thought in relation to current debates on cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe Scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. This year's volume features a cluster of exceptional essays thatshed new light on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels and Faust, as well as fascinating articles on the early play Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilen and the poem "Ilmenau," Schiller's Die Räuber, and anessay that places Goethe's thought in relation to current debates about cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality. Engaging reviews of recent publications in Goethe studies round out the volume. Contributors include Eric Denton, Matt Erlin, Jaimey Fisher, Ingrid Rieger, Rainer Kawa, David Barry, Stephanie Dawson, and John Pizer. Simon J. Richter is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania. Book review editor Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German at Rutgers University.

Cruise tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors worldwide. This book is the first of its kind to provide in-depth insights into the emergence of mega-cruise tourism in destinations on the Arabian Peninsula and its impacts on local communities, their spaces, cultures, identities and tourist experiences. It offers a micro-sociological analysis, calling for holistic, participatory, mindful approaches and to rethink current exploitative tourism planning and development. It assumes a high political, social and economic importance within globalization. It draws on a long-term field study in an under-researched region in Asia that developed large-scale tourism recently to diversify the economy. The book provides insights on the destination development from a state of continuous growth to a sudden fall in tourism activities due to a sudden shock, caused by the global health pandemic and its resilience. It explores the sociocultural, economic and spatial challenges faced in international tourism development and its power relations analysed from different perspectives and within time. It analyses time-space compression, overtourism, urban tourism, nature-based tourism, enclavization, social capital, imaginaries, Cultural Ecosystem Services, slow tourism as well as just tourism. The book provides an innovative contribution to the planning and development of tourism destinations, communities and their spaces in which tourism operates in a fast pace. It will be of interest to academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students in the field of tourism and hospitality management, geography, sociology, anthropology, urban planning and environmental sciences. Moreover, the book will be useful for practitioners and policymakers around the globe, as well as all those interested in the fast emergence and the impacts of mega-cruise tourism.

Landscape, as it appears and is described throughout the works of Bernardo Carvalho and Robert Walser, provides an excellent—yet virtually unexplored—pathway to the authors’ literary projects. The landscape functions here as a synthetic and unifying figure that triggers, at first, through the analysis of its description per se, the main and most evident elements of the authors’ works. However, when sustained as a methodological figure beyond the scope of its own description, the landscape soon reveals a darker, far more fascinating and far less explored side of the authors’ oeuvres: a vengeful, seemingly defeatist resentment against the status quo, which gives way to the more latent and biting elements of the authors’ prose, such as irony, the unheimlich, an anti-heroic agenda, the apocalyptic aesthetics of a disaster-prone fictional world, as well as an understanding of history and literature through the figures of failure and marginality. By drawing from diverse critical traditions from Latin-America and Europe, this comparative text seeks to unravel, in all of its complexity and scope, the fictional stage upon which Walser’s and Carvalho’s characters narrate, with their dying breath, a world that is slowly undoing itself.