Mei Yang - Böcker

River Space in Contemporary Chinese Cinema examines how filmmakers use river imagery to explore themes of home, displacement, and belonging in an era of rapid modernization.Using the term “river space” to describe geographical areas created by rivers or existing alongside them, the author shows how these areas figure in films as alternative, oppositional, or contradictory sites. The book is divided into four parts, discussing waterscape in Chinese cinema, homesickness and homelessness, rivers in the urban space, and a final comparative reading of Chinese, international, and Hollywood homecoming narratives. Bridging ecocriticism with spatial theories, she explores how rivers function as sites of moral reflection and ethical commitment, offering viewers alternative frameworks for understanding locality, homesickness, and the meaning of home in contemporary globalized society. This book will be particularly appealing to scholars and students of Chinese cinema, East Asian studies, eco-cinema, migration, and cultural studies.

The Olympic torch relay held before the 2008 Games was the moment when East met West on the media stage. This book analyses the torch relay and its representation, offering a discursive construction of Olympic ideology by and through the media in both East and West. The author argues that the discourse used by the media in different social contexts reflected the diversity of ideologies and cultural values with which the Olympic flame was imbued.A corpus-based Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis (DHA-CDA) is applied to media discourse in the United Kingdom and in China to examine the complexity, contradiction and conflicts in linguistic interpretations of Olympic ideology. Corpora drawn from the China Daily, BBC News and The Guardian are described, interpreted in their linguistic contexts, and then explained in terms of the broader historical and socio-political contexts surrounding the dynamic life of the Olympic torch relay. This unique study sheds light on the significance of the Olympic Games for East-West media discourse and analysis.