Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem particularly ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book.

The Alien Within is the first book-length thematic study...

In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. The plays were seen not simply as the emergence of a new literary form but as a manifestation of modernity itself, transforming the stage into a site for the exploration of new ideas and ways of being. A Beggar's Art is the first book in English to examine the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama. Accompanying his study, M. Cody Poulton provides his translations of representative one-act plays. Poulton looks at the emergence of drama as a...

Zeami: Performance Notes presents the full range of Zeami's critical thought on this subject, which focused on the aesthetic values of no and its antecedents, the techniques of playwriting, the place of allusion, the training of actors, the importance of patronage, and the relationship between performance and broader intellectual and...

Although still virtually unknown in the West, Ooka Shohei (1909-1988) is one of Japan's most important and influential writers and social critics. The Burdens of Survival is both a seminal English-language study of this preeminent literary figure and one of the first scholarly works to thoroughly examine the war literature of a major Japanese veteran-author. Drawing on Robert Jay Lifton's work on traumatic experience and survivor psychology, the book tells the illuminating story of Ooka's arduous journey that began with guilt-ridden survival as a prisoner of war in the Philippines and...

Thomas Rimer's book seeks to explain the background, structural principles, and development of pre-modem and modern Japanese fiction in a way that is comprehensive, methodical, and accessible to the general reader.

Originally published in 1978.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal...

This is an innovative, scholarly and original study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through the Second World War and into the post-war period. Nina Cornyetz embarks on new and unprecedented readings of some of the most significant literary and film texts of the Japanese canon, for instance works by Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo and Shinoda Masahiro, all renowned for their texts' aesthetic and philosophic brilliance.

Cornyetz uniquely opens up the field in a fresh and controversial way by showing how these authors and filmmakers' concepts of...

Using the Euro-American theoretical framework of postmodernism, feminism and post-colonialism, this book analyses the fictional and critical work of four contemporary Japanese writers; Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin. In addition the author reconsiders this Euro-American theory by looking back on it from the perspective of Japanese literary work.

Presenting outstanding analysis of Japanese intellectuals and writers who have received little attention in the West, the book also includes an extensive and comprehensive bibliography making...

The term strong refers not just to those with strength and power. It also includes other ideal attributes such as beauty, youth and goodness. Similarly, the term weak implies not only the weak and infirm, but also the disadvantaged, the indecent, the unsophisticated and those generally shunned by society. The former are associated not only with...