In this first book-length study of Ayn Rand's anti-utopia Anthem, essays explore the historical, literary, and philosophical themes presiding in this novella written in opposition to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union (and Nazi Germany). Written in 1937, published in 1938 in Britain, and subsequently in a revised form in the United States in 1946, Anthem investigates the importance of the ego and freedom, and the individual against the state. Editor Robert Mayhew has...

Rarely has a writer and thinker of the stature of Ayn Rand afforded us access to her most intimate thoughts and feelings. From Journals of Ayn Rand, we gain an invaluable new understanding and appreciation of the woman, the artist, and the philosopher, and of the enduring legacy she has left us.Rand comes vibrantly to life as an untried screenwriter in Hollywood, creating stories that reflect her youthful vision of the world. We see her painful memories of...

Informed by Erik Erikson’s concept of the formation of ego identity, this book, which first appreared in 1961, is an analysis of the experiences of fifteen Chinese citizens and twenty-five Westerners who underwent “brainwashing” by the Communist Chinese government. Robert Lifton constructs these case histories through personal interviews and outlines a thematic pattern of death and rebirth, accompanied by feelings of guilt, that characterizes the process of “thought reform.” In a new prefa...

Beyond the Little Red Book: China's revolutionary leader and his philosophyIn this collection of essays, China's Chairman Mao Tse-Tung explains the interpretation of Marxism-Leninism ideology that became known as Maoism. This philosophy fueled the Chinese Revolution and the massive social and economic changes Mao instituted as the nation's leader. From examining the way contradictions can cause great shifts within a society, to the necessity of guerilla-based revol...

Perhaps nowhere else has literature been as conscious a collective endeavor as in China, and China's survival over three thousand years may owe more to its literary traditions than to its political history. This Very Short Introduction tells the story of Chinese literature from antiquity to the present, focusing on the key role literary culture played in supporting social and political concerns. Embracing traditional Chinese understandings of literature as encompassing history and...

"North Korea is not just a security or human rights problem (although it is those things) but a real society. This book gets us closer to understanding North Korea beyond the usual headlines, and does so in a richly detailed, well-researched, and theoretically contextualized way."---Charles K. Armstrong, Director, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University"One of this book's strengths is how it deals at the same time with historical, geographical, political, artistic, a...

Chinese Reportage details for the first time in English the creation and evolution of a distinctive literary genre in twentieth-century China. Reportage literature, while sharing traditional journalism’s commitment to the accurate, nonfictional portrayal of experience, was largely produced by authors outside the official news media. In identifying the literary merit of this genre and establishing its significance in China’s leftist cultural legacy, Charles A. Laughlin reveals impo...

The first volume to offer a comprehensive scholarly treatment of Rand’s entire corpus (including her novels, her philosophical essays, and her analysis of the events of her times), this Companion provides vital orientation and context for scholars and educated readers grappling with a controversial and understudied thinker whose enduring influence on American (and world) culture is increasingly recognized.The first publication to provide an in-depth scholarly treatme...

Recognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Gloria Davies’s vivid portrait gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place.

Vampire Nation is a nuanced analysis of the cultural and political rhetoric framing ‘the serbs’ as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the cultural imaginaries and rhetorical mechanisms that inform nationalist discourses more broadly. Tomislav Z. Longinović points to the Gothic associations of violence, blood, and soil in the writings of many intellectuals and politicians during the 1990s, especially in portrayals by the U.S.-led Western ...

Despised by the intellectual establishment, Ayn Rand continues to attract many thousands of devoted followers. Her "Objectivist" movement preaches an uncompromising hard line on politics, art, sex, and psychological health. Though much has been written about Rand, The Ayn Rand Cult is the first book to explain the true origin of her ideas and to show how they were shaped into a new, atheistic religion. Jeff Walker shatters many myths about Rand, exposing Objectivism as a classic c...

While the fiction of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand is extremely popular and enduring, little has been written on it so far. This book consists of essays, most of which are new, by top Rand scholars on Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus. The essays deal with historical, literary, and philosophical topics, surpassing related writings in breadth and depth of analysis. The historical essays cover the writing of Atlas Shrugged, its publication history, and its reception....