Download or read book Utamakura Allusion and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry written by Edward Kamens and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kamens focuses especially on one figure, "the buried tree," which refers to fossilized wood associated in particular with an utamakura site, the Natori River, and is mentioned in poems that first appear in anthologies in the early tenth century. The figure surfaces again at many points in the history of traditional Japanese poetry, as do the buried trees themselves in the shallow waters that otherwise conceal them. After explaining and discussing the literary history of the concept of utamakura, Kamens traces the allusive and intertextual development of the figure of the buried tree and the use of the place-name Natorigawa in waka poetry through the late nineteenth-century. He investigates the relationship between utamakura and the collecting of fetishes and curios associated with utamakura sites by waka connoisseurs.

Download or read book Utamakura Allusion and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry written by Edward Kamens and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Edward Kamens analyzes a wide selection of poems to show how utamakura came to wield special powers within Japanese poetry. He reveals how poets in generation after generation returned, either in person or in imagination, to these places and to poems about them to encounter again the forms, styles, and techniques of their forbears, and to discover ways to create new poems of their own. Kamens focuses especially on one figure, "the buried tree," which refers to fossilized wood associated in particular with an utamakura site, the Natori River, and is mentioned in poems that first appear in anthologies in the early tenth century. The figure surfaces again at many points in the history of traditional Japanese poetry, as do the buried trees themselves in the shallow waters that otherwise conceal them. After explaining and discussing the literary history of the concept of utamakura, Kamens traces the allusive and intertextual development of the figure of the buried tree and the use of the place-name Natorigawa in waka poetry through the late nineteenth-century. He investigates the relationship between utamakura and the collecting of fetishes and curios associated with utamakura sites by waka connoisseurs. And he analyzes in detail the use of utamakura and their pictorial representations in a political and religious program in an architectural setting the Saishoshitennoin program of 1207.

Download or read book Celebrating Sorrow written by and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating Sorrow explores the medieval Japanese fascination with grief in tributes to The Tale of Sagoromo, the classic story of a young man whose unrequited love for his foster sister leads him into a succession of romantic tragedies as he rises to the imperial throne. Charo B. D'Etcheverry translates a selection of Sagoromo-themed works, highlighting the diversity of medieval Japanese creative practice and the persistent and varied influence of a beloved court tale. Medieval Japanese readers, fascinated by Sagoromo's sorrows and success, were inspired to retell his tale in stories, songs, poetry, and drama. By recontextualizing the tale's poems and writing new libretti, stories, and commentaries about the tale, these medieval aristocrats, warriors, and commoners expressed their competing concerns and ambitions during a chaotic period in Japanese history, as well as their shifting understandings of the tale itself. By translating these creative responses from an era of uncertainty and turmoil, Celebrating Sorrow shows the richness and enduring relevance of Japanese classical and medieval literature.

Download or read book Rhetoric in Modern Japan written by Massimiliano Tomasi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhetoric in Modern Japan is the first volume to discuss the role of Western rhetoric in the creation of a modern Japanese oral and narrative style. It considers the introduction of Western rhetoric, clarifying its interactions with the forces and synergies that shaped Japanese literature and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the Meiji and Taishō years (1868-1926), it challenges the prevailing view among contemporary scholars that rhetoric did not play a significant role in the literary developments of the period. Massimiliano Tomasi chronicles the blooming of scholarship in the field in the early 1870s, providing the first descriptive analysis and cogently articulated critique of the major rhetorical treatises of the time. In discussing the rise of public speaking in early Meiji society, he unveils the existence of crucial links between the study of rhetoric and the social and literary events of the time, underscoring the key role played by oratory both as a tool for social modernization and as an effective platform for the reappraisal of the spoken language. The collusion and conflicts characterizing rhetoric and its relationship with the genbun itchi movement, which sought to unify spoken and written language, are explored, demonstrating that their perceived antagonism was the uh_product of a misguided notion of rhetoric and the process of rhetorical signification rather than a true theoretical conflict. Tomasi makes a convincing argument that, in fact, Western rhetoric mediated between these equally compelling pursuits and paved the way toward an acceptable compromise between classical and colloquial written styles.

Download or read book The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics written by Roland Greene and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-26 with total page 1678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.

Download or read book The Poetry Contest in Six Hundred Rounds 2 vols written by Thomas E. McAuley and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 1308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the monumental Poetry Competition in Six Hundred Rounds (Roppyakuban uta’awase), twelve poets each provided one hundred waka poems, fifty on seasonal topics and fifty on love, which were matched, critiqued by the participants and judged by Fujiwara no Shunzei, the premiere poet of his age. Its critical importance is heightened by the addition of a lengthy Appeal (chinjō) against Shunzei’s judgements by the conservative poet and monk, Kenshō. It is one of the key texts for understanding poetic and critical practice in late twelfth century Japan, and of the conflict between conservative and innovative poets. The Competition and Appeal are presented here for the first time in complete English translation with accompanying commentary and explanatory notes by Thomas McAuley.

Download or read book Modern Japan Student Economy Edition written by Mikiso Hane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the essential facts of modern Japanese history. It covers a variety of important developments through the 1990s, giving special consideration to how traditional Japanese modes of thought and behavior have affected the recent developments.

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 2018-03-20 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thousand years ago, a young Japanese girl embarked on a journey from deep in the countryside of eastern Japan to the capital. Forty years later, with the long account of that journey as a foundation, the mature woman skillfully created an autobiography that incorporates many moments of heightened awareness from her long life. Married at age thirty-three, she identified herself as a reader and writer more than as a wife and mother; enthralled by fiction, she bore witness to the dangers of romantic fantasy as well as the enduring consolation of self-expression. This reader’s edition streamlines Sonja Arntzen and Moriyuki Itō’s acclaimed translation of the Sarashina Diary for general readers and classroom use. This translation captures the lyrical richness of the original text while revealing its subtle structure and ironic meaning, highlighting the author’s deep concern for Buddhist belief and practice and the juxtaposition of poetic passages and narrative prose. The translators’ commentary offers insight into the author’s family and world, as well as the style, structure, and textual history of her work.

Download or read book Waka and Things Waka as Things written by Edward Kamens and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A challenging study offering a new perspective on classical Japanese poems and how they interact with and are part of material culture This generously illustrated volume offers a fresh perspective on classical Japanese poetry (waka), including many poems treated here for the first time in a Western-language publication. Edward Kamens examines these poems both as they relate to material things and as things in and of themselves, exploring their intimate connections to artifacts and works of visual art, sacred and secular alike, and investigating the unique rhetorical messages and powers accessed and activated through these multimedia productions. This book makes a major contribution to Japanese literary and cultural studies.

Download or read book Modern Japan written by Mikiso Hane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrating political events with cultural, economic, and intellectual movements, Modern Japan provides a balanced and authoritative survey of modern Japanese history. A summary of Japan's early history, emphasizing institutions and systems that influenced Japanese society, provides a well-rounded introduction to this essential volume, which focuses on the Tokugawa period to the present. The fifth edition of Modern Japan is updated throughout to include the latest information on Japan's international relations, including secret diplomatic correspondence recently disclosed on WikiLeaks. This edition brings Japanese history up to date in the post 9/11 era, detailing current issues such as: the impact of the Gulf Wars on Japanese international relations, the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear accident, the recent tumultuous change of political leadership, and Japan's current economic and global status. An updated chronological chart, list of prime ministers, and bibliography are also included.

Download or read book How Dark Is My Flower written by Leith Morton and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-01-30 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores romantic love in modern Japanese literature through the work of the leading poet in the Myōjō circle

Download or read book Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women written by Christina Laffin and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women explores the world of thirteenth-century Japan through the life of a prolific noblewoman known as Nun Abutsu (1225–1283). Abutsu crossed gender and genre barriers by writing the first career guide for Japanese noblewomen, the first female-authored poetry treatise, and the first poetic travelogue by a woman—all despite the increasingly limited social mobility for women during the Kamakura era (1185–1336). Capitalizing on her literary talent and political prowess, Abutsu rose from middling origins and single-motherhood to a prestigious marriage and membership in an esteemed literary lineage. Abutsu’s life is well documented in her own letters, diaries, and commentaries, as well as in critiques written by rivals, records of poetry events, and legal documents. Drawing on these and other literary and historiographical sources, including The Tale of Genji, author Christina Laffin demonstrates how medieval women responded to institutional changes that transformed their lives as court attendants, wives, and nuns. Despite increased professionalization of the arts, competition over sources of patronage, and rivaling claims to literary expertise, Abutsu proved her poetic capabilities through her work and often used patriarchal ideals of femininity to lay claim to political and literary authority. Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women effectively challenges notions that literary salons in Japan were a phenomenon limited to the Heian period (794–1185) and that literary writing and scholarship were the domain of men during the Kamakura era. Its analysis of literary works within the context of women’s history makes clear the important role that medieval women and their cultural contributions continued to play in Japanese history.

Download or read book The Craft of Oblivion written by Albert Galvany and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-07-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Craft of Oblivion is an innovative and groundbreaking volume that aims to study, for the first time, the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization. Oblivion has tended to be relegated to a marginal position, often conceived as the mere destructive or undesirable opposite of memory, even though it performs an essential function in our lives. Forgetting and memory, far from being autonomous and mutually exclusive spheres, should be seen as interdependent phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from history, philosophy, literature, and religion, and examining both transmitted texts and excavated materials, the contributors to this volume analyze various ways of understanding oblivion and its complex and fertile relations with memory in ancient China.

Download or read book Hyakunin shu written by Joshua S. Mostow and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hyakunin’shu: Reading the Hundred Poets in Late Edo Japan explores the “popular literary literacy” of the Japanese at the edge of modernity. By reproducing and translating a well-known annotated and illustrated Ansei-era (1854–1859) edition of the Hyakunin isshu—for hundreds of years the most basic and best-known waka primer in the entire Japanese literary canon—Joshua Mostow reveals how commoners of the time made sense of the collection. Thanks to the popularization of the poems in the early modern period and the advent of commercial publishing, the Hyakunin’shu (as it was commonly called) was no longer the exclusive intellectual property of the upper classes but part of a poetic heritage shared by all literate Japanese. Mostow traces the Hyakunin’shu’s history from the first published collections in the early sixteenth century and printed commentaries of formerly esoteric and secret exegesis to later editions that include imagined portraits of the poets and, ultimately, pictures of the “heart”—pictorializations of the meaning of the poems themselves. His study illuminates the importance of “variant One Hundred Poets,” such as the Warrior One Hundred Poets, in popularizing the collection and the work’s strong association with feminine education from the early eighteenth century onward. The National Learning (Kokugaku) movement pursued a philological analysis of the poems, leading to translations of the Hyakunin’shu into contemporary, vernacular, spoken Japanese. The poems eventually served as the basis of a card game that became a staple of New Year festivities. This volume presents some innovations in translating premodern Japanese poetry: in the Introduction, Mostow considers the Hyakunin’shu’s reception during the Edo, when male homoerotic relationships were taken for granted, and makes the case for his translating the love poems in a non-heteronormative way. In addition, the translated poems are lineated to give readers a sense of the original edition’s chirashi-gaki, or “scattered writing,” allowing them to see how each poem’s sematic elements are distributed on the page.

Download or read book Heian Japan Centers and Peripheries written by Mikael S. Adolphson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This exceptionally rich set of essays substantially advances our understanding of the Heian era, presenting the period as more fascinating, multi-faceted, and integrated than it has ever been before. This volume marks a turning point in the study of early Japanese culture and will be indispensable for future explorations of the era." —Andrew Edmund Goble, University of Oregon "As a Japanese historian, I enthusiastically recommend Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first multi-author English-language academic work to offer a synthetic treatment of the Heian period. Japan’s emperor system is the last remaining sovereignty of its kind in human history, and this volume is indispensable when considering what sovereignty itself means in the present. To that end, the classical patterns established in the Heian period are superbly analyzed in this volume through the dual approach of ‘centers and peripheries.’" —Hotate Michihisa, Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo The first three centuries of the Heian period (794–1086) saw some of its most fertile innovations and epochal achievements in Japanese literature and the arts. It was also a time of important transitions in the spheres of religion and politics, as aristocratic authority was consolidated in Kyoto, powerful court factions and religious institutions emerged, and adjustments were made in the Chinese-style system of ruler-ship. At the same time, the era’s leaders faced serious challenges from the provinces that called into question the primacy and efficiency of the governmental system and tested the social/cultural status quo. Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first book of its kind to examine the early Heian from a wide variety of multidisciplinary perspectives, offers a fresh look at these seemingly contradictory trends. Essays by fourteen leading American, European, and Japanese scholars of art history, history, literature, and religions take up core texts and iconic images, cultural achievements and social crises, and the ever-fascinating patterns and puzzles of the time. The authors tackle some of Heian Japan’s most enduring paradigms as well as hitherto unexplored problems in search of new ways of understanding the currents of change as well as the processes of institutionalization that shaped the Heian scene, defined the contours of its legacies, and make it one of the most intensely studied periods of the Japanese past. Contributors: Ryûichi Abé, Mikael Adolphson, Bruce Batten, Robert Borgen, Wayne Farris, Karl Friday, G. Cameron Hurst III, Edward Kamens, D. Max Moerman, Samuel Morse, Joan R. Piggott, Fukutò Sanae, Ivo Smits, Charlotte von Verschuer.

Download or read book Japan in Print written by Mary Elizabeth Berry and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-02-16 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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

Download or read book The Kokinsh written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled in the early tenth century, the Kokinshū is an anthology of some eleven hundred poems that aimed to elevate the prestige of vernacular Japanese poetry at the imperial court. From shortly after its completion to the end of the nineteenth century, it was celebrated as the cornerstone of the Japanese vernacular poetic tradition. The composition of classical poetry, other later poetic forms such as linked verse and haikai, and vernacular Japanese literary writing in its entirety (including classic works such as Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book) all draw from the Kokinshū. This book offers an inviting and immersive selection of roughly one-third of the anthology in English translation. Torquil Duthie focuses on rendering the poetic language of the Kokinshū as a whole, in such a way that readers can understand and experience how its poems work together to create a literary world. He emphasizes that classical Japanese poems do not stand alone as self-contained artifacts but take part in an ongoing intertextual conversation. Duthie provides translations and interpretations of the two prefaces to the Kokinshū, which deeply influenced Japanese literary aesthetics. The book also includes critical essays on various aspects of the anthology and its history. This translation helps specialist and nonspecialist readers alike appreciate the beauty and richness of the Kokinshū, as well as its significance for the Japanese literary tradition.