Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

Perhaps the most admired childhood memoir ever written in Japan, The Silver Spoon is a sharp detailing of life at the end of the Meiji period (1912) through the eyes of a boy as he grows into adolescence. Innocence fades as he slowly becomes aware of himself and others, while scene after scene richly evokes the tastes, lifestyles, landscapes, objects, and manners of a lost Japan.

Kansuke Naka (1885-1965) was a Japanese poet, essayist, and novelist. He was a student of the great novelist Soseki Natsume, who lavishly praised the -freshness and dignity- of Naka's prose and...

Multiple Translation Communities in Contemporary Japan offers a collection of essays that (1) deepens the understanding of the cultural and linguistic diversity of communities in contemporary Japan and how translation operates in this shifting context and circulates globally by looking at some of the ways it is theorized and approached as a significant social, cultural, or political practice, and harnessed by its multiple agents; (2) draws attention to the multi-platform translations of cultural productions such as manga, which are both particular to and popular in Japan but also...

As an especially beautiful and pure example of the archaic epic styles that were once current among the hunting and fishing peoples of northern Asia, the Ainu epic folklore is of immense literary value. This collection and English translation by Donald Philippi contains thirty-three representative selections from a number of epic genres including mythic epics, culture hero epics, women's epics, and heroic epics. This is the first time, outside of Japan, that the Ainu epic folklore has been treated in a comprehensive manner.

Originally published in 1979.

The Princeton Legacy...

If you're a contrarian, or simply wish to imagine a radically different future, The Last Bastion of Civilization will challenge your current world-view.

Written as a series of letters and short essays, each of the 18 chapters attacks a present-day assumption with a counter-punch argument of its own.

Sometimes controversial, always challenging, it's a future to consider given today's world affairs.

-Blencowe's writing is fast-paced and easily readable. The structure of the book is unusual, in that it's not a novel,...

As an especially beautiful and pure example of the archaic epic styles that were once current among the hunting and fishing peoples of northern Asia, the Ainu epic folklore is of immense literary value. This collection and English translation by Donald Philippi contains thirty-three representative selections from a number of epic genres including mythic epics, culture hero epics, women's epics, and heroic epics. This is the first time, outside of Japan, that the Ainu epic folklore has been treated in a comprehensive manner.

Originally published in 1979.

The Princeton Legacy...

From the 1980s onwards, the incidence of eating disorders and self-harm has increased among Japanese women, who report receiving mixed messages about how to be women. Mirroring this, women's self-directed violence has increasingly been thematised in diverse Japanese narrative and visual culture.

This book examines the relationship between normative femininity and women's self-directed violence in contemporary Japanese culture. To theoretically define the complexities that constitute normativity, the book develops the concept of 'contradictive femininity' and shows how in...

Literary critiques of Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century The Tale of Genji have often focused on the amorous adventures of its eponymous hero. In this paradigm-shifting analysis of the Genji and other mid-Heian literature, Doris G. Bargen emphasizes the thematic importance of Japan's complex polygynous kinship system as the domain within which courtship occurs. Heian courtship, conducted mainly to form secondary marriages, was driven by power struggles of succession among lineages that focused on achieving the highest position possible at court. Thus interpreting courtship in light of...

Lucy Fraser's The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy-Tale Transformations of -The Little Mermaid- explores Japanese and English transformations of Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 Danish fairy tale -The Little Mermaid- by focusing on pleasure as a means to analyze the huge variety of texts that transform a canonical fairy tale such as Andersen's. Fraser examines over twenty Japanese and English transformations, including literary texts, illustrated books, films, and television series. This monograph also draws upon criticism in both Japanese and English,...

Images of the city in literature and film help constitute the experience of modern life. Studies of the Japanese city have focused on Tokyo, but a fuller understanding of urban space and life requires analysis of other cities, beginning with Osaka. Japan's "merchant capital" in the late sixteenth century, Osaka remained an industrial center--the "Manchester of the East"--into the 1930s, developing a distinct urban culture to rival Tokyo's. It therefore represents a critical site of East Asian modernity. Osaka Modern maps the city as imagined in Japanese popular culture from the...