Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) was a public intellectual who played a pivotal role in shaping modern Japan's cultural identity. A self-taught folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, he promoted folk studies in Japan. So extensive was his role that he has been compared with the fabled Grimm Brothers of Germany and the great British folklorist James G. Frazer (1854-1941), author of The Golden Bough. This monograph is only the second book-length English-language examination of Yanagita, and it is the first analysis that moves beyond a biographical account of his pioneering work in folk...

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,...

Shojo manga are romance comics for teenage girls. Characterized by a very dense visual style, featuring flowery backgrounds and big-eyed, androgynous boys and girls, it is an extremely popular and prominent genre in Japan. Why is this genre so appealing? Where did it come from? Why do so many of the stories feature androgynous characters and homosexual romance? Passionate Friendship answers these questions by reviewing Japanese girls' print culture from its origins in 1920s and 1930s girls' literary magazines to the 1970s "revolution" shojo manga, when young women artists took over the...

This provocative collection of essays is a comprehensive study of the father-daughter dynamic in Japanese female literary experience. Its contributors examine the ways in which women have been placed politically, ideologically, and symbolically as daughters in a culture that venerates the father. They weigh the impact that this daughterly position has had on both the performance and production of women's writing from the classical period to the present.

Conjoining the classical and the modern with a unified theme reveals an important continuum in female authorship-a historical...

Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) was born into an illustrious lineage of poets just as Japan's ancien regime was ceding authority to a new political order dominated by military power. Overcoming personal and political setbacks, Teika and his allies championed a new style of poetry that managed to innovate conceptually and linguistically within the narrow confines of the waka tradition and the limits of its thirty-one syllable form. Backed by powerful patrons, Teika emerged finally as the supreme arbiter of poetry in his time, serving as co-compiler of the eighth imperial anthology of waka,...

The role of translation in the formation of modern Japanese identities has become one of the most exciting new fields of inquiry in Japanese studies. This book marks the first attempt to establish the contours of this new field, bringing together seminal works of Japanese scholarship and criticism with cutting-edge English-language scholarship.

Collectively, the contributors to this book address two critical questions: 1) how does the conception of modern Japan as a culture of translation affect our understanding of Japanese modernity and its relation to the East/West divide? and...

Modern Japanese women writers as artists as cultural critics is a subject that has not received adequate attention from Japan specialists in North America. Translated and discussed here are critical essays by three of the most innovative, outspoken, and provocative women writers in recent Japanese literary history: Yuriko Miyamoto (1899-1951), Saegusa Kazuko (1929- ), and Minako Oba (1930-2007) with the objective of, one, presenting a Japan that thrives in and on a multiplicity of voices, in contrast to its conformist image in the West; and, two, filling the critical need for English...