Idealism, Protest, and the Tale of Genji
Idealism, Protest, and the Tale of Genji

Author: James McMullen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 9780198152514

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This book takes a fresh look at early modern Japanese Confucian thought through a study of Kumazawa Banzan (1619-91). It argues that, contrary to the often-held view that Confucianism was an ideological tool used to support the current regime, Banzan's thought suggests that the traditioncontained elements subversive to the status quo: Banzan is presented as a figure of protest. The book explores his stormy relations with feudal authority and his remonstrations against contemporary maladministration. Banzan also criticized the historical militarization of Japanese societyand high consumption, which he believed to cause deforestation and climatic warming. His thinking extended to metaphysics and the question of Japan's national identity. A remarkable feature of his thought was his identification of an arcadian society in the Tale of Genji, a book condemned bymost of his fellow Confucian thinkers. This book is based on Banzan's written works, both published and in manuscript, his correspondence, and other contemporary sources.

Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy
Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy

Author: Chun-chieh Huang

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-09-05

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 9048129214

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The Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy will be part of the handbook series Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy, published by Springer. This series is being edited by Professor Huang Yong, Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown University and Editor of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. This volume includes original essays by scholars from the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China, discussing important philosophical writings by Japanese Confucian philosophers. The main focus, historically, will be the early-modern period (1600-1868), when much original Confucian philosophizing occurred, and Confucianism in modern Japan. The Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy makes a significant contribution to the Dao handbook series, and equally to the field of Japanese philosophy. This new volume including original philosophical studies will be a major contribution to the study of Confucianism generally and Japanese philosophy in particular.

The Disaster of the Third Princess
The Disaster of the Third Princess

Author: Royall Tyler

Publisher: ANU E Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1921536675

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These seven essays by the most recent English translator of The Tale of Genji emphasize three major interpretive issues. What is the place of the hero (Hikaru Genji) in the work? What story gives the narrative underlying continuity and form? And how does the closing section of the tale (especially the ten 'Uji chapters') relate to what precedes it? Written over a period of nine years, the essays suggest fresh, thought-provoking perspectives on Japan¿s greatest literary classic.

Envisioning the Tale of Genji
Envisioning the Tale of Genji

Author: Haruo Shirane

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 0231142374

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Bringing together scholars from across the world, Haruo Shirane presents a fascinating portrait of The Tale of Genji's reception and reproduction over the past thousand years. The essays examine the canonization of the work from the late Heian through the medieval, Edo, Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei periods, revealing its profound influence on a variety of genres and fields, including modern nation building. They also consider parody, pastiche, and re-creation of the text in various popular and mass media. Since the Genji was written by a woman for female readers, contributors also take up the issue of gender and cultural authority, looking at the novel's function as a symbol of Heian court culture and as an important tool in women's education. Throughout the volume, scholars discuss achievements in visualization, from screen painting and woodblock prints to manga and anime. Taking up such recurrent themes as cultural nostalgia, eroticism, and gender, this book is the most comprehensive history of the reception of The Tale of Genji to date, both in the country of its origin and throughout the world.

Japan in Print
Japan in Print

Author: Mary Elizabeth Berry

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2006-02-16

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0520237668

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“Anyone interested in the history of media and communications should read Beth Berry's extraordinary book. Learned, lucid, and lively, it has much to teach students of premodern societies in Europe and elsewhere.”—Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University “In Japan in Print, Mary Elizabeth Berry crisply condenses a remarkable amount of primary research on difficult and little-known materials, and it interprets those materials in a highly original framework. The scholarship is superb, and the writing is as masterful as the research. Anyone interested in East Asian cultural production will find this compelling reading.”—Kären E. Wigen, author of The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 “This is a very important book, not only for its insights into a vast body of previously overlooked texts, but also for its methodology. While historians have known that early modern Japan produced maps, for example, no one has heretofore compared them to their medieval predecessors or examined them for what they say about an emerging Japanese cartographic imagination. This is a highly original work, and it will change the field.”—Anne Walthall, author of The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration

Early Modern Japanese Literature
Early Modern Japanese Literature

Author: Haruo Shirane

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2008-04-21

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780231516143

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This abridged edition of Haruo Shirane's popular anthology, Early Modern Japanese Literature, retains the essential texts that have made the original volume such a valuable resource. The book introduces English-speaking readers to prose fiction genres, including dangibon, kibyoshi (satiric picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon, kokkeibon (books of humor), gokan (bound books), and ninjobon (books of romance and sentiment). It also features poetic genres such as waka, haiku, senryu, and kyoka, and plays ranging from Chikamatsu's puppet plays to nineteenth-century kabuki. Readers will continue to benefit from the anthology's selection of significant essays, treatises, literary criticism, folk stories, and other noncanonical works, as well as the numerous prints that accompanied these works. They will also find Shirane's introductions and critical commentary, which guide the reader through the allusive and often elliptical nature of these incredible selections.

Imagining Harmony
Imagining Harmony

Author: Peter Flueckiger

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-10-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0804776393

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Many intellectuals in eighteenth-century Japan valued classical poetry in either Chinese or Japanese for its expression of unadulterated human sentiments. They also saw such poetry as a distillation of the language and aesthetic values of ancient China and Japan, which offered models of the good government and social harmony lacking in their time. By studying the poetry of the past and composing new poetry emulating its style, they believed it possible to reform their own society. Imagining Harmony focuses on the development of these ideas in the life and work of Ogyu Sorai, the most influential Confucian philosopher of the eighteenth century, and that of his key disciples and critics. This study contends that the literary thought of these figures needs to be understood not just for what it has to say about the composition of poetry but as a form of political and philosophical discourse. Unlike other scholars of this literature, Peter Flueckiger argues that the increased valorization of human emotions in eighteenth-century literary thought went hand in hand with new demands for how emotions were to be regulated and socialized, and that literary and political thought of the time were thus not at odds but inextricably linked.

In Search of the Way
In Search of the Way

Author: Richard Bowring

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0198795238

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A history of intellectual and religious developments in Japan during the Tokugawa period (1582-1860), this volume deals with social, cultural, and religious interplay, primarily focusing on the Neo-Confucian search for the Way, a pattern of existence that could provide order for society at large, as well as self-fulfilment for the individual.

A History of Japan
A History of Japan

Author: Conrad Totman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 724

ISBN-13: 1119022355

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This is an updated edition of Conrad Totman's authoritative history of Japan from c.8000 BC to the present day. The first edition was widely praised for combining sophistication and accessibility. Covers a wide range of subjects, including geology, climate, agriculture, government and politics, culture, literature, media, foreign relations, imperialism, and industrialism. Updated to include an epilogue on Japan today and tomorrow. Now includes more on women in history and more on international relations. Bibliographical listings have been updated and enlarged. Part of The Blackwell History of the World Series The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge about the entire human past, for every curious person in every part of the world. It will comprise some two dozen volumes, of which some provide synoptic views of the history of particular regions while others consider the world as a whole during a particular period of time. The volumes are narrative in form, giving balanced attention to social and cultural history (in the broadest sense) as well as to institutional development and political change. Each provides a systematic account of a very large subject, but they are also both imaginative and interpretative. The Series is intended to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and the accessibility of its volumes is matched by the style of presentation and production.