Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton's words, endlessly interpretable, and food, like literature, looks like an object but is actually a relationship. So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people's...

Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909) is widely regarded as the founder of the modern Japanese novel. His novel Floating Clouds (1887-1889) was written in a colloquial narrative style that was unprecedented in Japanese literature, as was its negative hero. Futabatei was also a pioneer translator of Russian literature, translating works by Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky and others - his translations had an enormous impact (perhaps even greater than his novels) on the development of Japanese literature.

In this groundbreaking work, Hiroko Cockerill analyses the development of Futabatei's...

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...

Having earned an international reputation with his booker-prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro is fast emerging as an important cultural figure of our times.

In this guide to Ishiguro s varied and often experimental work, Wai-chew Sim presents:

• a biographical survey of Ishiguro s literary career, and an introduction to his novels, plays and short stories
• an accessible overview of the contexts and many interpretations of his work, from publication to the present
• discussions of key topics in Ishiguro...

Girl Reading Girl provides the first overview of the cultural significance of girls and reading in modern and contemporary Japan with emphasis on the processes involved when girls read about other girls.

The collection examines the reading practices of real life girls from differing social backgrounds throughout the twentieth century while a number of chapters also consider how fictional girls read attention is given to the diverse cultural representations of the girl, or shojo, who are the objects of the reading desires of Japan's real life and fictional girls....

This is the most complete reader's guide available on Japan's highly revered novel, the eleventh-century classic, The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, referred to by Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata as the "highest pinnacle of Japanese literature." Written specifically to accompany the translation of the work by Arthur Waley and Edward G. Seidensticker, this guide offers detailed summaries and thematic commentaries, as well...

Much has been written about Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), one of Japan's most celebrated writers. Known primarily for his novels, he also published a large and diverse body of short personal writings (shohin) that have long lived in the shadow of his fictional works. The essays, which appeared in the Asahi shinbun between 1907 and 1915, comprise a fascinating autobiographical mosaic, while capturing the spirit of the Meiji era and the birth of modern Japan.

In Reflections in a Glass Door, Marvin Marcus introduces readers to a rich sampling of Soseki's shohin. The writer revisits his...

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 monumental Japanese fictional narrative known as The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) appeared during the first decade or so of the eleventh century, CE. This vast narrative--which spans three-quarters of a century, and is made up of fifty-four chapters and 795 poems--has been attributed to a woman known only as Murasaki Shikibu. It has often been celebrated as 'the world's oldest novel'.

The Tale of Genji has generated a huge scholarly literature, and this new collection, co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, meets the need for an authoritative reference work...