Lu Xun

While the piano is a western invention, it has come to occupy a special position in Chinese musical life. The earliest Chinese piano pieces date from the first half of the twentieth century; many remain popular in the concert hall today. This latest release in Naxos' Chinese Classics focuses on piano works from the Republican period (1911-1949), featuring Jie Chen, Bronze Medal Winner of the 2005 Santander Piano Competition. The music draws on well-known ancient melodies or folk-tunes, as reflected in the titles.

The 121 revised full papers and 52 short papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 invited papers and those of the keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 467 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics, including e-learning platforms and tools, learning resource management, practice and experience sharing, e-learning standards, mobile learning, education and remote classrooms, effectiveness of VR for education, life long learning, collaborative environments, remote group simulations, collaborative learning, virtual reality in education, game design and development, game engine development, game AI and artificial life, game physics, game rendering, virtual characters/agents, online/mobile game/video game, storytelling and game narrative, affective interaction in games, digital museum, digital heritage, animation techniques, augmented reality, and mixed reality.

The movie starts with a middle-aged Confucius, when he serves in the Kingdom of Lu's government, advocating his political idea that a nation should be ruled with courtesy and morality.
However, his political ambitions are plagued by an opposing clan, and so at the age of 55, the frustrated Confucius leaves the kingdom of Lu and travels through different states for 14 years, followed, fortunately, by dozens of his loyal disciples.
The movie's director, Hu Mei, is distinguished for her historical TV dramas; but nevertheless, she took a muddy and risky path when she decided to tell the story of Confucius in a biographical fashion. In the first place, historical records and documents about Confucius don't offer enough dramatic elements to help compose a good plot. More importantly, the greatness of the ancient sage is mostly evidenced by his thoughts rather than his life events; therefore, the movie was born with a drama-deficiency.

This book mainly addresses the position, function, influence, and values of folk oral literature in the history of Chinese literature. Divided into 14 chapters, it systematically covers central aspects of folklore literature such as ballads, folk songs, Bianwen, Zajuci, Guzici, Zhugongdiao, Sanqu, Baojuan, Tanci, Zidishu, and so on from the Pre-Qin to the late Qing Dynasties, filling several gaps in literary history studies. It is a comprehensive literary work, and many of the materials cited here are rare and difficult to find. In addition, the book proposes some important theories, especially six highly generalized qualities of folk literature, namely that it is: popular, collective, oral, fresh, effusive, and innovative.