Download or read book A Woman s Weapon written by Doris G. Bargen and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text presents an examination of Murasaki Shikibu's 11th-century classic The Tale of Genji. The author explores the role of possessing spirits from a female viewpoint, and considers how the male protagonist is central to determining the role of these spirits.
Download or read book The Tale of Genji written by Murasaki Shikibu and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-01-31 with total page 1217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world’s first novel, in a translation that is “likely to be the definitive edition . . . for many years to come” (The Wall Street Journal) A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic. Royall Tyler’s superior translation is detailed, poetic, and superbly true to the Japanese original while allowing the modern reader to appreciate it as a contemporary treasure. Supplemented with detailed notes, glossaries, character lists, and chronologies to help the reader navigate the multigenerational narrative, this comprehensive edition presents this ancient tale in the grand style that it deserves.
Download or read book A History of Women Philosophers written by M.E. Waithe and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1989-12-31 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: aspirations, the rise of western monasticism was the most note worthy event of the early centuries. The importance of monasteries cannot be overstressed as sources of spirituality, learning and auto nomy in the intensely masculinized, militarized feudal period. Drawing their members from the highest levels of society, women's monasteries provided an outlet for the energy and ambition of strong-willed women, as well as positions of considerable authority. Even from periods relatively inhospitable to learning of all kinds, the memory has been preserved of a good number of women of education. Their often considerable achievements and influence, however, generally lie outside even an expanded definition of philo sophy. Among the most notable foremothers of this early period were several whose efforts signal the possibility of later philosophical work. Radegund, in the sixth century, established one of the first Frankish convents, thereby laying the foundations for women's spiritual and intellectual development. From these beginnings, women's monasteries increased rapidly in both number and in fluence both on the continent and in Anglo-Saxon England. Hilda (d. 680) is well known as the powerful abbsess of the double monastery of Whitby. She was eager for knowledge, and five Eng lish bishops were educated under her tutelage. She is also accounted the patron of Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon poet of religious verse. The Anglo-Saxon nun Lioba was versed in the liberal arts as well as Scripture and canon law.
Download or read book The Disaster of the Third Princess written by Royall Tyler and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Bridge of Dreams written by Haruo Shirane and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bridge of Dreams is a brilliant reading of The Tale of Genji that succeeds both as a sophisticated work of literary criticism and as an introduction this world masterpiece. Taking account of current literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly baffling work. The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments, sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji and the manner in which recurrent concerns--political, social, and religious--are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the work evolves from one stage to another. Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the Genji works both within and against the larger literary and sociopolitical tradition. The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual problems and a detailed index of principal characters.
Download or read book The Sarashina Diary written by Sugawara no Takasue no Musume and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thousand years ago, a young Japanese girl embarked on a journey from the wild East Country to the capital. She began a diary that she would continue to write for the next forty years and compile later in life, bringing lasting prestige to her family. Some aspects of the author's life and text seem curiously modern. She married at age thirty-three and identified herself as a reader and writer more than as a wife and mother. Enthralled by romantic fiction, she wrote extensively about the disillusioning blows that reality can deal to fantasy. The Sarashina Diary is a portrait of the writer as reader and an exploration of the power of reading to shape one's expectations and aspirations. As a person and an author, this writer presages the medieval era in Japan with her deep concern for Buddhist belief and practice. Her narrative's main thread follows a trajectory from youthful infatuation with romantic fantasy to the disillusionment of age and concern for the afterlife; yet, at the same time, many passages erase the dichotomy between literary illusion and spiritual truth. This new translation captures the lyrical richness of the original text while revealing its subtle structure and ironic meaning. The introduction highlights the poetry in the Sarashina Diary and the juxtaposition of poetic passages and narrative prose, which brings meta-meanings into play. The translators' commentary offers insight into the author's family and world, as well as the fascinating textual legacy of her work.
Download or read book A Waka Anthology Volume Two written by Edwin A. Cranston and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 1332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grasses of Remembrance, the second volume of Edwin Cranston's monumental Waka Anthology, carries forward the story of Japanese court poetry, drawing on sources dating from the 890s to the 1080s. The book presents over 2,600 poems in lively and readable translation, including all 795 poems from The Tale of Genji.
Download or read book The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga written by Lynne K. Miyake and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-06-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study examines the unlikely merger of two Japanese cultural phenomena, an 11th-century aristocratic text and contemporary manga comics. It explores the ways in which the manga versions of The Tale of Genji use gender, sexuality, and desire to challenge perceptions of reading and readership, morality and ethics, and what is translatable from one culture to another. Lynne K. Miyake shows that, through their girls, ladies, Boy Love, boys and young men, and informational comics remediations of the tale, the manga Genjis visually, narratively, and affectively rework male and female gazes; Miyake reveals how they gently inject humor, eroticize, gender flip, queer, and simultaneously re-inscribe and challenge heteronormative gender norms. The first full-length study of Genji manga, this book analyses these adaptations within manga studies and the historical and cultural moments that fashioned and sustained them. It also interrogates the circumscribed, in-group aristocratic society and the consumer and production practices of the Heian society that come full circle in the manga versions. The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga utilizes western queer, feminist, sexuality and gender theory and Japanese cultural practices to illuminate the ways in which the Genji tale redeploys itself. Yet it also provides much needed context and explanation regarding the charges of appropriation of prepubescent (fe)male and gay bodies and the utilization of (sexual) violence mounted against Genji manga-and manga and anime in general once they went global.
Download or read book Envisioning The Tale of Genji written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-28 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Splendor of Longing in the Tale of the Genji written by Norma Field and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foremost among Japanese literary classics and one of the world's earliest novels, the Tale of Genji was written around the year A.D. 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman from a declining aristocratic family. For sophisticaion and insight, Western prose fiction was to wait centuries to rival her work. Norma Field explore the shifting configurations of the Tale, showing how the hero Genji is made and unmade by a series of heroines. Professor Field draws on the riches of both Japanesse and Western scholarship, as well as on her own sensitive reading of the Tale. Included are discussions of the social, psychological, and political dimensions of the aesthetics of this novel, with emphasis on the crucial relationship of erotic and political concerns to prose fiction. Norma Field is Assistant Professor of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue Between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy written by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To introduce this collection of research studies, which stem from the pro grams conducted by The World Phenomenology Institute, we need say a few words about our aims and work. This will bring to light the significance of the present volume. The phenomenological philosophy is an unprejudiced study of experience in its entire range: experience being understood as yielding objects. Experi ence, moreover, is approached in a specific way, such a way that it legitima tizes itself naturally in immediate evidence. As such it offers a unique ground for philosophical inquiry. Its basic condition, however, is to legitimize its validity. In this way it allows a dialogue to unfold among various philosophies of different methodologies and persuasions, so that their basic assumptions and conceptions may be investigated in an objective fashion. That is, instead of comparing concepts, we may go below their differences to seek together what they are meant to grasp. We may in this way come to the things them selves, which are the common objective of all philosophy, or what the great Chinese philosopher Wang Yang Ming called "the investigation of things". It is in this spirit that the Institute's programs include a "cross-cultural" dialogue meant to bring about a profound communication among philosophers in their deepest concerns. Rising above artificial cultural confinements, such dialogues bring scholars, thinkers and human beings together toward a truly human community of minds. Our Institute unfolds one consistent academic program.
Download or read book The Tale of Genji and its Chinese Precursors written by Jindan Ni and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Tale of Genji and Its Chinese Precursors: Beyond the Boundaries of Nation, Class, and Gender, Jindan Ni departs from a “nativist” tradition which views The Tale of Genji as epitomizing an exclusively Japanese aesthetic distinct from Chinese influence and Buddhist values. Ni contests the traditional focus on Japanese essentialism by detailing the impact of Chinese literary forms and presenting the Japanese Heian Court as a site of dynamic and complex literary interchange. Combining close reading, the archival work of Japanese and Chinese scholars, and comparative literary theory, Ni argues that Murasaki Shikibu avoided the constraint of a single literary tradition by drawing on Chinese intertexts. Ni’s account reveals the heterogeneity that makes The Tale of Genji a masterpiece with enduring appeal.
Download or read book Noh Drama and The Tale of the Genji written by Janet Goff and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese noh theater has enjoyed a rich, continuous history dating back to the Muromachi period (1336-1573), when virtually the entire repertoire was written. Some of the finest plays were inspired by the eleventh-century masterpiece of court literature, The Tale of Genji. In this detailed study of fifteen noh plays based upon the Genji, Janet Goff looks at how the novel was understood and appreciated by Muromachi audiences. A work steeped in the court poetry, or waka, tradition, the Genji in turn provided a source of inspiration and allusion for later poets, who produced a variety of handbooks and digests on the work as an aid in composing poetry. Drawing on such sources from the Muromachi period, Goff shows how playwrights reflected contemporary attitudes toward the Genji, even as they transformed its material to suit the demands of the noh as a theatrical form. This book includes annotated translations of the plays, many of them appearing in English for the first time. The translations are preceded by essays covering the history of each play and its use of Genji material. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Tale of Genji written by Melissa McCormick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the eleventh century by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of prose and poetry that is widely considered the world's first novel. Melissa McCormick provides a unique companion to Murasaki's tale that combines discussions of all fifty-four of its chapters with paintings and calligraphy from the Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums, the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In this book, the album's colorful painting and calligraphy leaves are fully reproduced for the first time, followed by McCormick's insightful essays that analyze the Genji story and the album's unique combinations of word and image. This stunning compendium also includes English translations and Japanese transcriptions of the album's calligraphy, enabling a holistic experience of the work for readers today. In an introduction to the volume, McCormick tells the fascinating stories of the individuals who created the Genji Album in the sixteenth century, from the famous court painter who executed the paintings and the aristocrats who brushed the calligraphy to the work's warrior patrons and the poet-scholars who acted as their intermediaries. Beautifully illustrated, this book serves as an invaluable guide for readers interested in The Tale of Genji, Japanese literature, and the captivating visual world of Japan's most celebrated work of fiction.
Download or read book Fictions of Femininity written by Edith Sarra and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the middle ranks whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilitieserotic, political, and literaryof real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the authors negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing. Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish. The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its authors treatment of the thematics of seeing and being seen with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.
Download or read book The Tale of Murasaki written by Liza Dalby and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2002-08-13 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tale of Murasaki is an elegant and brilliantly authentic historical novel by the author of Geisha and the only Westerner ever to have become a geisha. In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, the most popular work in the history of Japanese literature. In The Tale of Murasaki, Liza Dalby has created a breathtaking fictionalized narrative of the life of this timeless poet–a lonely girl who becomes such a compelling storyteller that she is invited to regale the empress with her tales. The Tale of Murasaki is the story of an enchanting time and an exotic place. Whether writing about mystical rice fields in the rainy mountains or the politics and intrigue of the royal court, Dalby breathes astonishing life into ancient Japan.
Download or read book Mapping Courtship and Kinship in Classical Japan written by Doris G. Bargen and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 genealogies is essential for comprehending the politics of interpersonal behavior in many of these texts. Bargen focuses on the genealogical maze—the literal and figurative space through which several generations of men and women in the Genji moved. She demonstrates that courtship politics sought to control kinship by strengthening genealogical lines, while secret affairs and illicit offspring produced genealogical uncertainty that could be dealt with only by reconnecting dissociated lineages or ignoring or even terminating them. The work examines in detail the literary construction of a courtship practice known as kaimami, or “looking through a gap in the fence,” in pre-Genji tales and diaries, and Sei Shōnagon’s famous Pillow Book. In Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji, courtship takes on multigenerational complexity and is often used as a political strategy to vindicate injustices, counteract sexual transgressions, or resist the pressure of imperial succession. Bargen argues persuasively that a woman observed by a man was not wholly deprived of agency: She could choose how much to reveal or conceal as she peeked through shutters, from behind partitions, fans, and kimono sleeves, or through narrow carriage windows. That mid-Heian authors showed courtship in its innumerable forms as being influenced by the spatial considerations of the Heian capital and its environs and by the architectural details of the residences within which aristocratic women were sequestered adds a fascinating topographical dimension to courtship. In Mapping Courtship and Kinship in Classical Japan readers both familiar with and new to The Tale of Genji and its predecessors will be introduced to a wholly new interpretive lens through which to view these classic texts. In addition, the book includes charts that trace Genji characters’ lineages, maps and diagrams that plot the movements of courtiers as they make their way through the capital and beyond, and color reproductions of paintings that capture the drama of courtship.