Download or read book Women Writers of Meiji and Taisho Japan written by Yukiko Tanaka and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After centuries of repression of the female voice in literature, the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) periods in Japanese history saw important changes in both the way women wrote and the way they were read. However, even the most accepted female writers of these two eras were judged by criteria different from those applied to men, and only the most conservative were praised by the (male) critics. This study of the women who wrote in the modern era examines both famous and now-obscure writers within the context of their moments in time and their influence on later generations of Japanese women writers. Arranged chronologically, the book covers the pioneering women of the early Meiji period, the ethos of reactionary conservatism, the romantic movement in poetry, women writers of the naturalist school, Taisho liberalism, and the new era of literary women. An introduction outlines the various schools of Japanese female writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the social and cultural trends that helped produce them. The text is appropriate for both well-read scholars of Japanese literature and newcomers to the works of the "fair ladies of the back chamber," as these creative and driven writers were once called.

Download or read book The Modern Murasaki written by Rebecca L. Copeland and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first anthology of its kind, The Modern Murasaki brings the vibrancy and rich imagination of women's writing from the Meiji period to English-language readers. Along with traditional prose, the editors have chosen and carefully translated short stories, plays, poetry, speeches, essays, and personal journal entries. Selected readings include writings by the public speaker Kishida Toshiko, the dramatist Hasegawa Shigure, the short-fiction writer Shimizu Shikin, the political writer Tamura Toshiko, and the novelists Miyake Kaho, Higuchi Ichiyo, Tazawa Inabune, Kitada Usurai, Nogami Yaeko, and Mizuno Senko. The volume also includes a thorough introduction to each reading, an extensive index listing historical, social, and literary concepts, and a comprehensive guide to further research. The fierce tenor and bold content of these texts refute the popular belief that women of this era were passive and silent. A vital addition to courses in women's studies and Japanese literature and history, The Modern Murasaki is a singular resource for students and scholars.

Download or read book Becoming Modern Women written by Michiko Suzuki and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-10 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a fresh examination of women writers and prewar ideology, this book breaks new ground in its investigation of love as a critical aspect of Japanese culture during the early to mid-twentieth century. As a literary and cultural history of love and female identity, Becoming Modern Women focuses on same-sex love, love marriage, and maternal love—new terms at that time; in doing so, it shows how the idea of "woman," within the context of a vibrant print culture, was constructed through the modern experience of love. Author Michiko Suzuki's work complements current scholarship on female identities such as "Modern Girl" and "New Woman," and interprets women's fiction in conjunction with nonfiction from a range of media—early feminist writing, sexology books, newspapers, bestselling love treatises, native ethnology, and historiography. While illuminating the ways in which women used and challenged ideas about love, Suzuki explores the historical and ideological shifts of the period, underscoring the broader connections between gender, modernity, and nationhood.

Download or read book Be a Woman written by Joan E. Ericson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joan Ericson's magnificent survey of writing by Japanese women significantly advances the current debate over the literary category of "women's literature" in modern Japan and demonstrates its significance in the life and work of twentieth-century Japan's most important woman writer, Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). Until the early 1980s, the literary category of "women's literature" (joryu bungaku) segregated most writing by modern Japanese women from the literary canon. "Women's literature" was viewed as a sentimental and impressionistic literary style that was popular but was critically disparaged. A close scrutiny of Hayashi Fumiko's work--in particular the two pieces masterfully translated here, the immensely popular novel Horoki (Diary of a Vagabond) and Suisen (Narcissus)--shows the inadequacies of categorizing her writing as "women's literature." Its originality and power are rooted in the clarity and immediacy with which Hayashi is able to convey the humanity of those occupying the underside of Japanese society, especially women.

Download or read book Taish Chic written by Kendall H. Brown and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of these works have never been published and several major paintings, exhibited in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s then lost after the war, are brought to light here for the first time in decades. This catalogue not only presents newly discovered works but also, in bringing together a broad range of objects representative of mainstream Taisho visual culture, reconstructs the styles popular from 1915 to 1935 in a celebration of Taisho Chic."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature written by Rachael Hutchinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach to the content, the chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory. The Handbook examines various modes of literary production (such as fiction, poetry, and critical essays) as distinct forms of expression that nonetheless are closely interrelated. Attention is drawn to the idea of the bunjin as a ‘person of letters’ and a more realistic assessment is provided of how writers have engaged with ideas – not labelled a ‘novelist’ or ‘poet’, but a ‘writer’ who may at one time or another choose to write in various forms. The book provides an overview of major authors and genres by situating them within broader themes that have defined the way writers have produced literature in modern Japan, as well as how those works have been read and understood by different readers in different time periods. The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature draws from an international array of established experts in the field as well as promising young researchers. It represents a wide variety of critical approaches, giving the study a broad range of perspectives. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Literature, Sociology, Critical Theory, and History.

Download or read book Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation written by Maria Chiara Oltolini and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation is the first academic work to examine World Masterpiece Theater (Sekai Meisaku Gekijô, 1969-2009), which popularized the practice of adapting foreign children's books into long-running animated series and laid the groundwork for powerhouses like Studio Ghibli. World Masterpiece Theater (Sekai Meisaku Gekijô, 1969-2009) is a TV staple created by the Japanese studio Nippon Animation, which popularized the practice of adapting foreign children's books into long-running animated series. Once generally dismissed by critics, the series is now frequently investigated as a key early work of legendary animators Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki. In the first book-length examination of the series, Maria Chiara Oltolini analyzes cultural significance of World Masterpiece Theater, and the ways in which the series pioneered the importance of children's fiction for Japanese animation studios and laid the groundwork for powerhouses like Studio Ghibli. Adapting a novel for animation also means decoding (and re-coding) socio-cultural patterns embedded in a narrative. World Masterpiece Theater stands as a unique example of this linguistic, medial, and cultural hybridisation. Popular children's classics such as Little Women, Peter Pan, and Anne of Green Gables became the starting point of a full-fledged negotiation process in which Japanese animators retold a whole range of narratives that have one basic formula in common: archetypal stories with an educational purpose. In particular, the series played a role in shaping the pop culture image of a young girl (shôjo). Examining the series through the lens of animation studies as well as adaptation studies, Oltolini sheds new light on this long-neglected staple of Japanese animation history.

Download or read book Lost Leaves written by Rebecca L. Copeland and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Japanese literary historians have suggested that the Meiji Period (1868-1912) was devoid of women writers but for the brilliant exception of Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896). Rebecca Copeland challenges this claim by examining in detail the lives and literary careers of three of Ichiyo's peers, each representative of the diversity and ingenuity of the period: Miyake Kaho (1868-1944), Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864-1896), and Shimizu Shikin (1868-1933). In a carefully researched introduction, Copeland establishes the context for the development of female literary expression. She follows this with chapters on each of the women under consideration. Miyake Kaho, often regarded as the first woman writer of modern Japan, offers readers a vision of the female vitality that is often overlooked when discussing the Meiji era. Wakamatsu Shizuko, the most prominent female translator of her time, had a direct impact on the development of a modern written language for Japanese prose fiction. Shimizu Shikin reminds readers of the struggle women endured in their efforts to balance their creative interests with their social roles. Interspersed throughout are excerpts from works under discussion, most never before translated, offering an invaluable window into this forgotten world of women's writing.

Download or read book Writing Home Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature written by Stephen Dodd and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines the development of Japanese literature depicting the native place (furusato) from the mid-Meiji period through the late 1930s as a way of articulating the uprootedness and sense of loss many experienced as Japan modernized. The 1890s witnessed the appearance of fictional works describing a city dweller who returns to his native place, where he reflects on the evils of urban life and the idyllic past of his childhood home. The book concentrates on four authors who typify this trend: Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki Tōson, Satō Haruo, and Shiga Naoya. All four writers may be understood as trying to make sense of contemporary Japan. Their works reflect their engagement with the social, intellectual, economic, and technological discourses that created a network of shared experience among people of a similar age. This common experience allows the author to chart how these writers’ works contributed to the general debate over Japanese national identity in this period. By exploring the links between furusato literature and the theme of national identity, he shows that the debate over a common language that might “transparently” express the modern experience helped shape a variety of literary forms used to present the native place as a distinctly Japanese experience."

Download or read book Recreating Japanese Women 1600 1945 written by Gail Lee Bernstein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991-07-09 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work, offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the Western experience.

Download or read book The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe 1450 1850 written by Joseph P. McDermott and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions’ production, distribution, and consumption of books. The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting research on European books can instruct researchers on East Asian book production, so can the privileged role of noncommercial publications in the East Asian textual record highlight for historians of the European book the singular contribution of commercial printing and market demands to the making of the European printed record. Likewise, although production growth was accompanied in both regions by a wider distribution of books, woodblock technology’s simplicity and mobility allowed for a shift in China of its production and distribution sites farther down the hierarchy of urban sites than was common in Europe. And, the different demands and consumption practices within these two regions’ expanding markets led to different genre preferences and uses as well as to the growth of distinctive female readerships. A substantial introduction pulls the work together and the volume ends with an essay that considers how these historical developments shape the present book worlds of Eurasia. “This splendid volume offers expert new insight into the ways of producing, financing, distributing, and reading printed books in early modern Europe and East Asia. This is comparative history at its best, which leaves us with a better understanding of each context and of the challenges common to book cultures across space and time.” —Ann Blair, author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and professor of history, Harvard University “This engrossing account of the history of the book by leading specialists on the European and East Asian publishing worlds takes stock of what we know—and how much we still need to know—about the places that books had in the lives of our early modern forebears. Each chapter is masterful state-of-the-field coverage of its subject, and together they set a new standard for future studies of the book, East and West.” —Timothy Brook, author of The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

Download or read book Woman Critiqued written by Rebecca L. Copeland and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Women Critiqued' offers English-language readers access to some of the salient critiques that have been directed at women writers, on the one hand, and reactions to these by women writers, on the other.

Download or read book Telling Lives written by Ronald P. Loftus and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-06-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating collection of translations, Telling Lives looks at the self-writing of five Japanese women who came of age during the decades leading up to World War II. Following an introduction that situates women’s self-writing against the backdrop of Japan during the 1920s and 1930s, Loftus takes up the autobiographies of Oku Mumeo, a leader of the prewar women’s movement, and Takai Toshio, a textile worker who later became a well-known labor activist. Next is the moving story of Nishi Kyoko, whose Reminiscences tells of her life as a young woman who escapes the oppression of her family and establishes her financial independence. Nishi’s narrative precedes a detailed look at the autobiography of Sata Ineko. Sata’s Between the Lines of My Personal Chronology recounts her years as a member of a proletarian arts circle and her struggle to become a writer. The collection ends with the Marxist Fukunaga Misao’s frank and explosive text Memoirs of a Female Communist, which is examined as a manifesto condemning the male chauvinism of the prewar Japanese Communist Party.

Download or read book Writing Pregnancy in Low Fertility Japan written by Amanda C. Seaman and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-12-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan is a wide-ranging account of how women writers have made sense (and nonsense) of pregnancy in postwar Japan. While earlier authors such as Yosano Akiko had addressed the pain and emotional complexities of childbearing in their poetry and prose, the topic quickly moved into the literary shadows when motherhood became enshrined as a duty to state and sovereign in the 1930s and ’40s. This reproductive imperative endured after World War II, spurred by a need to create a new generation of citizens and consumers for a new, peacetime nation. It was only in the 1960s, in the context of a flowering of feminist thought and activism, that more critical and nuanced appraisals of pregnancy and motherhood began to appear. In her fascinating study, Amanda C. Seaman analyzes the literary manifestations of this new critical approach, in the process introducing readers to a body of work notable for the wide range of genres employed by its authors (including horror and fantasy, short stories, novels, memoir, and manga), the many political, personal, and social concerns informing it, and the diverse creative approaches contained therein. This “pregnancy literature,” Seaman argues, serves as an important yet rarely considered forum for exploring and debating not only the particular experiences of the pregnant mother-to-be, but the broader concerns of Japanese women about their bodies, their families, their life choices, and the meaning of motherhood for individuals and for Japanese society. It will be of interest to scholars of modern Japanese literature and women’s history, as well as those concerned with gender studies, feminism, and popular culture in Japan and beyond.

Download or read book Japan s Competing Modernities written by Sharon Minichiello and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1998-09-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, have studied the greater Taisho era (1900-1930) within the framework of Taisho demokurashii (democracy). While this concept has proved useful, students of the period in more recent years have sought alternative ways of understanding the late Meiji-Taisho period. This collection of essays, each based on new research, offers original insights into various aspects of modern Japanese cultural history from "modernist" architecture to women as cultural symbols, popular songs to the rhetoric of empire-building, and more. The volume is organized around three general topics: geographical and cultural space; cosmopolitanism and national identity; and diversity, autonomy, and integration. Within these the authors have identified a number of thematic tensions that link the essays: high and low culture in cultural production and dissemination; national and ethnic identities; empire and ethnicity; the center and the periphery; naichi (homeland) and gaichi (overseas); urban and rural; public and private; migration and barriers. The volume opens up new avenues of exploration for the study of modern Japanese history and culture. If, as one of the authors contends, the imperative is " to understand more fully the historical forces that made Japan what it is today," these studies of Japan's "competing modernities" point the way to answers to some of the country's most challenging historical questions in this century. Contributors: Gail L. Bernstein, Barbara Brooks, Lonny E. Carlile, Kevin M. Doak, Joshua A. Fogel, Sheldon Garon, Elaine Gerbert, Jeffrey E. Hanes, Helen Hardacre, Sharon A. Minichiello, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Jonathan M. Reynolds, Michael Robinson, Roy Starrs, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Julia Adeney Thomas, E. Patricia Tsurumi, Christine R. Yano.

Download or read book Women Adrift written by Noriko J. Horiguchi and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How women figured in the expansion of the national body of the Japanese empire

Download or read book The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature written by J. Thomas Rimer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-24 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Volume 2 of Columbia's comprehensive anthology of modern Japanese literature, thoughtfully selected and carefully translated readings portray the vast changes that have transformed Japanese culture since the end of the Pacific War. Beginning with the Allied Occupation in 1945 and concluding with the early twenty-first century, these stories, poems, plays, and essays reflect Japan's heady transition from poverty to prosperity, its struggle with conflicting ideologies and political beliefs, and the growing influence of popular culture on the country's artistic and intellectual traditions. Organized chronologically and by genre within each period, readings include fiction by Hayashi Fumiko and Oe Kenzaburo; poems by Ayukawa Nobuo, Katsura Nobuko, and Saito Fumi; plays by Mishima Yukio and Shimizu Kunio; and a number of essays, among them Eto Jun on Natsume Soseki and his brilliant novel Kokoro (The Heart of Things), and Kawabata Yasunari on the shape of his literary career and the enduring influence of classical Japanese literature. Some authors train a keen eye on the contemporary world, while others address the historical past and its relationship to modern culture. Some adopt an even broader scope and turn to European models for inspiration, while others look inward, exploring psychological and sexual terrain in new, often daring ways. Spanning almost six decades, this anthology provides a thorough introduction to a profound period of creative activity.