{"title":"Catherine Liu","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the thought-provoking works of Catherine Liu, exploring themes of class, culture, and identity with sharp insight. Perfect for readers seeking intellectual stimulation and critical perspectives on modern society.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"virtue-hoarders-book-catherine-liu-9781517912253","title":"Virtue Hoarders","description":"A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism   Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.  Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49529029460241,"sku":"CIN1517912253G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740827394321,"sku":"NGR9781517912253","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50273242480913,"sku":"GOR011873457","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50412628607249,"sku":"CIN1517912253VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1517912253.jpg?v=1764845590"},{"product_id":"dreams-of-interpretation-book-catherine-liu-9780816648009","title":"The Dreams of Interpretation","description":"Rethinking the importance of Sigmund Freud's landmark book  The Interpretation of Dreams","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50063349940497,"sku":"GOR008267109","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081664800X.jpg?v=1764843742"},{"product_id":"copying-machines-book-catherine-liu-9780816635030","title":"Copying Machines","description":"Explores literary theory’s fear of and fascination with the mechanical.    Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment—one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today.      A sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine and as a curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, Copying Machines offers extended readings of mechanistic images in the eighteenth century through the prism of twentieth-century commentary. In readings of texts by Lafayette, Molière, Laclos, and La Bruyère—and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson—Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which the automaton and the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancien régime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362823049489,"sku":"CIN081663503XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081663503X.jpg?v=1764845428"},{"product_id":"oriental-girls-desire-passion-book-catherine-liu-9781885030245","title":"Oriental Girls Desire Passion","description":"Th unnamed narrator of Oriental Girls Desire Romance, a young Chinese American woman, is a sharp and elo quent wit who skirts the edges of privilege and privation. S he out manoeuvres the easy answers of Prozac or reform in a voice that is perceptive. '","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50765091635473,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50765094420753,"sku":"CIN188503024XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/188503024X.jpg?v=1751280997"},{"product_id":"oriental-girls-desire-romance-book-catherine-liu-9781885030900","title":"Oriental Girls Desire Romance","description":"It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50765093404945,"sku":"CIN1885030908G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51057139974417,"sku":"NIN9781885030900","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52141710016785,"sku":"NLS9781885030900","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1885030908.jpg?v=1751314318"},{"product_id":"chinese-cooking-the-amer-way-book-catherine-liu-9780960499007","title":"Chinese Cooking the Amer Way","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50771178750225,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50771179766033,"sku":"CIN0960499008VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52950358360337,"sku":"CIN0960499008G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0960499008.jpg?v=1751045223"},{"product_id":"american-idyll-book-catherine-liu-9781609380502","title":"American Idyll","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eA trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Idyll\u003c\/i\u003e argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones.\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003eThroughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left's cultural criticism.\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003eBy unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. \u003ci\u003eAmerican Idyll\u003c\/i\u003e reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter's theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, \u003ci\u003eWhat if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades?\u003c\/i\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003ci\u003eAmerican Idyll\u003c\/i\u003e shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent--namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the \u003ci\u003ereal\u003c\/i\u003e political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51860646396177,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51860646625553,"sku":"CIN1609380509G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52397565935889,"sku":"GOR013104493","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781609380502.jpg?v=1753892532"},{"product_id":"traumatized-book-catherine-liu-9781804296745","title":"Traumatized","description":"In Traumatized, Liu exposes how an idea born from genuine suffering has been weaponized into a tool of social control. This is the story of how shell-shock became PTSD, how Oprah turned pain into profit, and how \"authenticity\" became the ultimate brand. It's a history of surveillance capitalism's greatest coup: convincing us that our wounds define us, that vulnerability is strength, and that we must endlessly accommodate each other's trauma while the powerful remain untouched.  Liu delivers an unflinching diagnosis of our current crisis-the collapse of liberal politics, the rise of performance fragility, and a culture that mistakes emotional display for political action. Sharp, provocative, and urgently necessary, Liu argues what we can do to combat a politics of permanent victimhood that individualizes suffering, destroys solidarity, and leaves us defenseless against the very systems that harm us.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53432986370321,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53432986796305,"sku":"NGR9781804296745","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781804296745.jpg?v=1776464561"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-catherine-liu.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}