Japan France And East West Aesthetics

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Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics

Author : Jan Hokenson
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 9780838640104
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics by : Jan Hokenson

Download or read book Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics written by Jan Hokenson and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan, France is the first comprehensive history of the idea of Japan in France, as tracked through close readings of canonical French writers and thinkers from the 1860s to the present. The focus is literary and intellectual, the context cultural. The discovery of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris, following the opening of Japan to the West in 1854, was a startling aesthetic encounter that played a crucial role in the Impressionists' and Post-Impressionists' invention of Modernism. French writers also experimented with Japanese aesthetics in their own work, in ways that similarly thread into the foundations of literary Modernism. Japonisme (the practice of adapting Japanese aesthetics to creative work in the West) became a sustained French tradition, in texts by such writers as Zola and Proust through Barthes and Bonnefoy. Each generation discovered new Japanese arts and genres, commented on the work of their predecessors in this vein, and broke still more ground in East-West aesthetics to innovate in the forms of Western literature and thought. To read literary history in this way unsettles Eurocentric assumptions about many of the French writers who are commonly considered the

Bachelor Japanists

Author : Christopher Reed
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231542763
Total Pages : 650 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Bachelor Japanists by : Christopher Reed

Download or read book Bachelor Japanists written by Christopher Reed and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging clichés of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists in the tumultuous century between the 1860s and the 1960s. Reed combines extensive archival research; analysis of art, architecture, and literature; the insights of queer theory; and an appreciation of irony to explore the East-West encounter through three revealing artistic milieus: the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes of late-nineteenth-century Paris; collectors and curators in turn-of-the-century Boston; and the mid-twentieth-century circles of artists associated with Seattle's Mark Tobey. The result is a groundbreaking integration of well-known and forgotten episodes and personalities that illuminates how Japanese aesthetics were used to challenge Western gender conventions. These disruptive effects are sustained in Reed's analysis, which undermines conventional scholarly investments in the heroism of avant-garde accomplishment and ideals of cultural authenticity.

New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics

Author : A. Minh Nguyen
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739180827
Total Pages : 527 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (391 download)

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Book Synopsis New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics by : A. Minh Nguyen

Download or read book New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics written by A. Minh Nguyen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents twenty-seven new essays in Japanese aesthetics by leading experts in the field. Beginning with an extended foreword by the renowned scholar and artist Stephen Addiss and a comprehensive introduction that surveys the history of Japanese aesthetics and the ways in which it is similar to and different from Western aesthetics, this groundbreaking work brings together a large variety of disciplinary perspectives—including philosophy, literature, and cultural politics—to shed light on the artistic and aesthetic traditions of Japan and the central themes in Japanese art and aesthetics. Contributors explore topics from the philosophical groundings for Japanese aesthetics and the Japanese aesthetics of imperfection and insufficiency to the Japanese love of and respect for nature and the paradoxical ability of Japanese art and culture to absorb enormous amounts of foreign influence and yet maintain its own unique identity. New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics will appeal not only to a wide range of humanities scholars but also to graduate and undergraduate students of Japanese aesthetics, art, philosophy, literature, culture, and civilization. Masterfully articulating the contributors’ Japanese-aesthetical concerns and their application to Japanese arts (including literature, theater, film, drawing, painting, calligraphy, ceramics, crafts, music, fashion, comics, cooking, packaging, gardening, landscape architecture, flower arrangement, the martial arts, and the tea ceremony), these engaging and penetrating essays will also appealto nonacademic professionals and general audiences. This seminal work will be essential reading for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of Japanese aesthetics.

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy

Author : Michiko Yusa
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474232698
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy by : Michiko Yusa

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy written by Michiko Yusa and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy examines the current vibrant trends in Japanese philosophical thinking. Situating Japanese philosophy within the larger context of global intercultural philosophical discourse and pointing to new topics of research, this Handbook covers philosophy of science, philosophy of peace, philosophy of social justice and healing. Introducing not only new readings of well-known Japanese philosophers, but also work by contemporary Japanese philosophers who are relatively unknown outside Japan, it makes a unique contribution by offering an account of Japanese philosophy from within and going beyond an objective description of it in its various facets. Also featured is the work of a younger generation of scholars and thinkers, who bring in fresh perspectives that will push the field into the future. These critical essays, by leading philosophers and rising scholars, to the past and the present of Japanese philosophy demonstrate ways of doing engaged philosophy in the present globalized age. With suggestions for further reading, a glossary, a timeline and annotated bibliography, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy is an ideal research guide to understanding the origin, transformation, and reception of Japanese philosophy in the 21st century.

Writing Japonisme

Author : Pamela A. Genova
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810132206
Total Pages : 545 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing Japonisme by : Pamela A. Genova

Download or read book Writing Japonisme written by Pamela A. Genova and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her book, Pamela Genova suggests that as critics move in general from a literal to a more metaphoric understanding and presentation of Japonisme, the mutability of the phenomenon is highlighted in a rich and illuminating manner. By exploring the conditions of the creation of these works, accenting the original aims of the artists, the manipulations carried out by art dealers, gallery owners, and boutique managers, as well as the gestures of explanation, interpretation, and judgment offered by the professional and amateur critics, Japonisme takes on an even more versatile nature. Further, a complex web of correspondence germinates among these artists—both French and Japanese—and their many critics. It is in this light that the truly rich character of Japonisme comes forth, since the undesirability, even the impossibility of the attempt to reduce it to a single genre, style, era, or cultural cadre attests to its elusiveness and its Protean nature. Japonisme does not correspond to a single dictionary definition, no matter how subtle or self-aware that definition might be. By situating the dynamics of Japonisme as a response on the part of French culture to the culture of Japan, we gain a keener sense of the multiplicity of modern French sensibility itself, of how the awareness of a nation’s language, history, and art forms can be creatively reflected in the images of a culture seemingly radically different from its own.

Roland Barthes at the Collège de France

Author : Lucy O'Meara
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1846318432
Total Pages : 235 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (463 download)

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Book Synopsis Roland Barthes at the Collège de France by : Lucy O'Meara

Download or read book Roland Barthes at the Collège de France written by Lucy O'Meara and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roland Barthes at the Collège de France studies the four lecture courses given by Roland Barthes in Paris between 1977 and 1980, placing Barthes's teaching within institutional, intellectual, and personal contexts. Theoretically wide-ranging, Lucy O'Meara's account focuses on Barthes's pedagogical style and the insights they provide into his written works, including his focus on essayism and fragmentation and the negotiation between singularity and universality. Linking Barthes's strategies to broad intellectual influences, from Kant and Adorno to Zen and Taoist philosophies, O'Meara reassesses Barthes's critical and ethical priorities in the decade before his death, highlighting the vitality of his late thought.

Searching for Japan

Author : Michele Monserrati
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1789625173
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (896 download)

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Book Synopsis Searching for Japan by : Michele Monserrati

Download or read book Searching for Japan written by Michele Monserrati and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan’s relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of ‘relational Orientalism,’ this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as ‘Oriental’ as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.

The Chrysantheme Papers

Author : Christopher Reed
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824860721
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis The Chrysantheme Papers by : Christopher Reed

Download or read book The Chrysantheme Papers written by Christopher Reed and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2010-08-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème (1888) enjoyed great popularity during the author’s lifetime, served as a source of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, and remains in print to this day as a classic in Western literature. Loti’s story, cast in the form of his fictionalized diary, describes the affair between a French naval officer and Chrysanthème, a temporary "bride" purchased in Nagasaki. More broadly, Loti’s novel helped define the terms in which Occidentals perceived Japan as delicate, feminine, and, to use one of Loti’s favorite words, "preposterous"—in short, ripe for exploitation. The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysanthème (1893) sought, according to a newspaper reviewer at the time, "to avenge Japan for the adjectives that Pierre Loti has inflicted on it." Written by Félix Régamey, a talented illustrator with firsthand knowledge of Japan, The Pink Notebook retells Loti’s story but this time as the diary of Chrysanthème. The book, presented here in English for the first time and together with the original French text and illustrations by Régamey and others, is certainly surprising in its late nineteenth-century context. Its retelling of a classic tale from the position of a character marginalized by her sex and race provocatively anticipates certain aspects of postmodern literature. Translator Christopher Reed’s rich and satisfying introduction compares Loti and Régamey in relation to attitudes toward Japan held by notable Japonistes Vincent van Gogh, Lafcadio Hearn, Edmond de Goncourt, and Philippe Burty. Reed provides further intellectual context by including new translations of excerpts from Loti’s novel as well as a portion of the travel journal of Régamey’s travel companion, the renowned collector Emile Guimet. Reed’s emphasis on competing Western ideas about Japan challenges conventional scholarly generalizations concerning Japanism in this era. This elegant translation of The Pink Notebook and Japoniste documents will delight both general and specialized readers, particularly those interested in the ambiguities in the dynamics of nationalism, gender, identification, and exploitation that, since the nineteenth century, have characterized the West’s relationship to Japan.

Fantasies of Ito Michio

Author : Tara Rodman
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472904485
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (729 download)

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Book Synopsis Fantasies of Ito Michio by : Tara Rodman

Download or read book Fantasies of Ito Michio written by Tara Rodman and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Japan and trained in Germany, dancer and choreographer Ito Michio (1893–1961) achieved prominence in London before moving to the U.S. in 1916 and building a career as an internationally acclaimed artist. During World War II, Ito was interned for two years, and then repatriated to Japan, where he contributed to imperial war efforts by creating propaganda performances and performing revues for the occupying Allied Forces in Tokyo. Throughout, Ito continually invented stories of voyages made, artists befriended, performances seen, and political activities carried out—stories later dismissed as false. Fantasies of Ito Michio argues that these invented stories, unrealized projects, and questionable political affiliations are as fundamental to Ito’s career as his ‘real’ activities, helping us understand how he sustained himself across experiences of racialization, imperialism, war, and internment. Tara Rodman reveals a narrative of Ito’s life that foregrounds the fabricated and overlooked to highlight his involvement with Japanese artists, such as Yamada Kosaku and Ishii Baku, and global modernist movements. Rodman offers “fantasy” as a rubric for understanding how individuals such as Ito sustain themselves in periods of violent disruption and as a scholarly methodology for engaging the past.

Samuel Beckett's Poetry

Author : James Brophy
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009222589
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Samuel Beckett's Poetry by : James Brophy

Download or read book Samuel Beckett's Poetry written by James Brophy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Beckett's Poetry is the first book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry, designed for students and scholars of twentieth century poetry and literature, as well as for specialists of Beckett's work. This volume explores how poetry provided Beckett a medium of expression during key moments in his life, from his earliest attempts at securing a reputation as a published writer, to the work of restoring his own speech while suffering aphasia shortly before his death. Often these were moments of desperation and discouragement, when more substantial works were not possible: moments of illness, of personal loss or of public disaster. This volume includes an introduction that contextualizes Beckett as a poet and a chronology of the composition and publication of all his known poems. Essays offer a range of critical perspectives, from translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies to Beckett's debts to Modernism, Romanticism and the Jazz Age.

Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist: French Without Borders

Author : Akane Kawakami
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1802075763
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist: French Without Borders by : Akane Kawakami

Download or read book Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist: French Without Borders written by Akane Kawakami and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michaël Ferrier is a prize-winning novelist, essayist and academic whose cosmopolitan life – he grew up in Chad and France, has Mauritian roots and lives in Japan – has inspired him to write some fascinating novels that cross generic and geographical boundaries. This book is the first ever monograph dedicated to his works, which explore themes as various as an African childhood, notions of Frenchness, inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan. Hybridity is key to his themes, forms and genres, which include – as befits a twenty-first century author – a website, called ‘Tokyo-Time-Table’ and discussed in this study. Kawakami uses an eclectic range of frameworks to analyse Ferrier’s output, ranging from translingualism to Environmental Humanities and Ferrier’s own vision of his oeuvre, which he discloses for the first time in this book in the interview that he grants Kawakami. This interview, first published in this volume, is rich in insights into Ferrier’s views on dreams, Japan, the internet, and collaborating with other artists. This book is an indispensable guide to an author who is one of the rising stars of contemporary French and Francophone literature, and a unique voice that crosses all kinds of borders across the globe.

Transnationalism and Translation in Modern Chinese, English, French and Japanese Literatures

Author : Ryan Johnson
Publisher : Anthem Press
ISBN 13 : 178527435X
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (852 download)

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Book Synopsis Transnationalism and Translation in Modern Chinese, English, French and Japanese Literatures by : Ryan Johnson

Download or read book Transnationalism and Translation in Modern Chinese, English, French and Japanese Literatures written by Ryan Johnson and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of “literary worlds” has become increasingly important in comparative and world literatures. But how are the often-contradictory elements of Eastern and Western literatures to cohere in the new worlds such contact creates? Drawing on the latest work in philosophical logic and analytic Asian philosophy, this monograph proposes a new model of literary worlds that is best suited to comparative literature dealing with Western and East Asian traditions. Unlike much discussion of world literature anchored in North American traditions, featured here is the transnational work of artists, philosophers, and poets writing in English, French, Japanese and Mandarin in the twentieth century. Rather than imposing sharp borders, this book suggests that vague boundaries link Eastern and Western literary works and traditions, and that degrees of distance can better help us to see the multiple dimensions that both distinguish and join together literary worlds East and West. As such, it enables us to grasp not only how East Asian and Western writers translate one another’s works into their own languages and traditions, but also how modern writers East and West modify their own traditions in order to make them fit in the new constellation of literary worlds brought about by the complex flow of literary information across twentieth-century Eurasia.

The New Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 3, The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c.1868 to the Twenty-First Century

Author : Laura Hein
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108169198
Total Pages : 945 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (81 download)

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Book Synopsis The New Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 3, The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c.1868 to the Twenty-First Century by : Laura Hein

Download or read book The New Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 3, The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c.1868 to the Twenty-First Century written by Laura Hein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new volume presents innovative recent scholarship on Japan's modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. An international team of leading scholars offer accessible and thought-provoking essays that present an expansive global vision of the archipelago's history from c. 1868 to the twenty-first century. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens, capturing international attention ever since. These Japanese efforts to reshape global hierarchies powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan's shores. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, this volume highlights Japan's distinctive and fast-changing history.

Beyond Chinoiserie

Author : Petra ten-Doesschate Chu
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004387838
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis Beyond Chinoiserie by : Petra ten-Doesschate Chu

Download or read book Beyond Chinoiserie written by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complex interweaving of different Western visions of China had a profound impact on artistic exchange between China and the West during the nineteenth century. Beyond Chinoiserie addresses the complexity of this exchange. While the playful Western “vision of Cathay” formed in the previous century continued to thrive, a more realistic vision of China was increasingly formed through travel accounts, paintings, watercolors, prints, book illustrations, and photographs. Simultaneously, the new discipline of sinology led to a deepening of the understanding of Chinese cultural history. Leading and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, literary studies and material culture, have authored the ten essays in this book, which deal with artistic relations between China and the West at a time when Western powers’ attempts to extend a sphere of influence in China led to increasingly hostile political interactions.

Pacific Rim Modernisms

Author : Mary Ann Gillies
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 0802091954
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Pacific Rim Modernisms by : Mary Ann Gillies

Download or read book Pacific Rim Modernisms written by Mary Ann Gillies and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pacific Rim Modernisms explores the complex ways that writers, artists, and intellectuals of the Pacific Rim have contributed to modernist culture, literature, and identity.

Modernism

Author : Astradur Eysteinsson
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027292043
Total Pages : 1059 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernism by : Astradur Eysteinsson

Download or read book Modernism written by Astradur Eysteinsson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-10-04 with total page 1059 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.

Quaint, Exquisite

Author : Grace Lavery
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691227799
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis Quaint, Exquisite by : Grace Lavery

Download or read book Quaint, Exquisite written by Grace Lavery and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Japan captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western aesthetics From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. Quaint, Exquisite explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, textual criticism, and a wealth of in-depth archival research, Grace Lavery provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. The book features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats’s prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. Quaint, Exquisite provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.