Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

Tosaka Jun (1900-1945) was one of modern Japan's most unique and important critics of capitalism, the emperor system, imperialism, and everyday life in wartime Japan. This collection of translations contains some of Tosaka's most important essays and original articles on Tosaka.

This is a partial translation of one of the most important texts produced by Motoori Norinaga. It covers a wide range of Norinaga's thought and provides a lens onto his philological methodology, as well as how he viewed literature, poetry, history, linguistics, and Shinto.

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...

Emmerich begins with an analysis of the lavishly produced best seller Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Bumpkin...

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...

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...

Until the late nineteenth century, Japan could boast of an elaborate cultural tradition surrounding the love and desire that men felt for other men. By the first years of the twentieth century, however, as heterosexuality became associated with an enlightened modernity, love between men was increasingly branded as feudal or immature. The resulting rupture in what has been called the male homosocial continuum constitutes one of the most significant markers of Japan s entrance into modernity. And yet, just as early Japanese modernity often seemed haunted by remnants of the premodern past,...

"Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari)" is traditionally identified as one of the most important Japanese literary texts of the Heian period (794 1185). Since its enshrinement in the classical literary canon as early as the eleventh century, the work has also been the object of intensive study and extensive commentary. Its idiosyncratic form 125 loosely connected episodes recounting the life and loves of an anonymous courtier and mysterious authorship have provoked centuries of explication.

Jamie Newhard s study skillfully combines primary-source research with a theoretically framed analysis,...

A Sense of Place examines the vast Kanto region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment during the political and military turmoil of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Japan. Through analysis of memoirs, letters, chronicles, poetry, travelogues, lawsuits, land registers, and archeological reports, David Spafford explores the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited: he considers the region both as a whole, in its literary representations and political and administrative dimensions, and as an aggregation of discrete...

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...

Translingual Narration is a study of colonial Taiwanese fiction, its translation from Japanese to Chinese, and films produced during and about the colonial era. It is a postcolonial intervention into a field largely dominated by studies of colonial Taiwanese writing as either a branch of Chinese fiction or part of a larger empire of Japanese language texts. Rather than read Taiwanese fiction as simply belonging to one of two discourses, Bert Scruggs argues for disengaging the nation from the former colony to better understand colonial Taiwan and its postcolonial critics.

Following...