Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

The...

Kabuki has been a part of Japanese culture for nearly four centuries. The plays performed today are generally selected from a classic repertoire that gradually ceased to develop once Japan broke the chains of its isolationist policy and began the surge toward Westernization. The plays largely reflect the values of feudal Japan, and they portray a world of noble samurai overcoming evil adversaries, adulterous lovers overcoming their dilemmas through double suicide, parents sacrificing their children in the name of loyalty to a superior, and children giving up their lives for the sake 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 it essential...

Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature looks at the ways in which authors writing in Japanese in the twentieth century constructed a division between the 'Self' and the 'Other' in their work. Drawing on methodology from Foucault and Lacan, the clearly presented essays seek to show how Japanese writers have responded to the central question of what it means to be 'Japanese' and of how best to define their identity.

Taking geographical, racial and ethnic identity as a starting point to explore Japan's vision of 'non-Japan', representations of the Other are...

The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature is a study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through WWII and into the postwar period. What makes this book unique is that Nina Cornyetz opens up the field in new and controversial ways by exploring the tensions and harmonies between psychoanalytic ethics of the drive and socio-political ethics of relation to the other. Rejecting the convention of viewing these as contradictory, Cornyetz insists that the exemplars of psychoanalytic ethics are to the contrary, simultaneously...

All four writers may be...

The eleventh-century masterpiece The Tale of Genji casts a long shadow across the literary terrain of the Heian period (794-1185). It has dominated critical and popular reception of Heian literary production and become the definitive expression of the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of life in the Heian court.

But the brilliance of Genji has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to critical obscurity.

Charo B. D'Etcheverry calls for a...

The writer Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992) rose to fame in the mid-1970s for his vivid stories about a clan scarred by violence and poverty on the underside of the Japanese economic miracle. Drawing upon the lives, experiences, and languages of the burakumin, the outcaste communities long discriminated against in Japanese society as a defiled underclass, Nakagami's works of fiction and nonfiction record with vitality and violence the realities--actual and imagined--of buraku culture.

In this critical study of Nakagami's life and oeuvre, Eve...