Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

Most Japanese literary historians have suggested that the Meiji Period (1868-1912) was devoid of women writers but for the brilliant exception of Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896). Rebecca Copeland challenges this claim by examining in detail the lives and literary careers of three of Ichiyo's peers, each representative of the diversity and ingenuity of the period: Miyake Kaho (1868-1944), Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864-1896), and Shimizu Shikin (1868-1933).

In a carefully researched introduction, Copeland establishes the context for the development of female literary expression. She follows this...

Postwar modernist verse has been rarely discussed in English-language works on Japanese literature, despite the fact that it has been the dominant mode of poetic expression in Japan since World War II. Now readers of modern Japanese poetry in translation have gained an impressive intellectual and linguistic companion in their enjoyment of modern Japanese verse. Modernism in Practice combines close readings of individual Japanese postwar poets and poetry with historical and critical analysis. Five of the seven chapters concentrate on the life and work of such outstanding poets as Soh Sakon,...

Postwar modernist verse has been rarely discussed in English-language works on Japanese literature, despite the fact that it has been the dominant mode of poetic expression in Japan since World War II. Now readers of modern Japanese poetry in translation have gained an impressive intellectual and linguistic companion in their enjoyment of modern Japanese verse. Modernism in Practice combines close readings of individual Japanese postwar poets and poetry with historical and critical analysis. Five of the seven chapters concentrate on the life and work of such outstanding poets as Soh Sakon,...

Woman Critiqued will make us wonder why we thought we could grasp modern Japanese literature without concerted attention to what men and women had to say about women's literary production. This remarkable collection is full of surprises, even where predictable arguments are being made. Careful translations of writings by the familiar and the obscure, together with thought-provoking introductions and supporting apparatus, make this an indispensable text for the study of modern Japanese culture and society. --Norma M. Field, University of Chicago

Over the past thirty years translations...

Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro collects nineteen interviews, conducted over the past two decades on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, with the author of Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. The interviews collectively address the entirety of this literary artist's career, affording readers of Ishiguro (b. 1954) the most vivid portrait yet of contexts and influences behind novels that have been garnering awards for a quarter-century. The interviews focus on the author's six novels--A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The...

Writing Okinawa is the first comprehensive study in English of Okinawan fiction, from it's emergence in the early twentieth-century through its most recent permutations. It provides readings of major authors and texts set against a carefully researched presentation of the region's political and social history; at the same time, it thoughtfully engages with current critical perspective with perspectives on subaltern identity, colonialism, and post-colonialism, and the nature of "regional," "minority," and "minor" literatures.

Is Okinawan fiction, replete with...

In an all-too-brief life and literary career, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947-1984) produced a substantial body of poetry. He broke new ground as a poet, translated Taoist classical literature and Japanese haiku, interwove perspectives from his Hawaiian heritage into his writing and art, and published his work locally, regionally, and internationally.

Westlake was born on Maui and raised on the island of O'ahu, where he attended Punahou School, and later the University of Oregon. He earned his B.A. in Chinese studies at the University of Hawai'i. At the time of his tragic death in...

The universality of William Faulkner's vision was perhaps most formally recognized in 1950, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But even beyond the basic human truths embodied in the people and terrain of Yoknapatawpha County, there is a special kinship between Faulkner's novels and stories of the defeated South and the culture of postwar Japan, itself reeling from the shock of surrender and reconstruction at the hands of a foreign army.

Reflecting this kinship, "Faulkner Studies in Japan" brings together some of the finest critical essays on Faulkner published in Japan...