Writing violence : the politics of form in early modern Japanese literature
David C. Atherton
Bok · Engelsk · 2023
| Omfang | xiii, 294 sider
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| Opplysninger | Creative destruction: remaking the world in seventeenth-century disaster literature -- The vengeance variations: revenge as form in the fiction of Ihara Saikaku -- The (un)crucified lovers: adultery, punishment and the "truth" of transgression -- Ueda Akinari and the form of fiction: in which a brother is celebrated for beheading his sister -- Frontier violence: late Yomihon form and the bodies and bounds of the realm -- Epilogue: Forms in context, forms beyond context.. - "Offers a new approach for understanding the relationship between the formal features of Edo-period Japanese popular fiction and the social and political world beyond its pages. Those formal features, which include formulaicness, narrative modularity, typological characters, and strong intertextual engagement with literary tradition, can appear to hold the "real" world at arm's length, leaving scholars divided over how to understand the politics of commercial fiction-or whether we should seek a politics there at all. Atherton addresses this problem by expanding our understanding of form to encompass both the aesthetic and the social realms. Drawing connections between the formal features of fiction and the Edo period's deep investment in social and political formalization, he demonstrates fiction's power to intervene in the perception of the world: to alter the perception of time and space, make latent social and economic forces apprehensible, defamiliarize conventions, and give voice to socially peripheral persons. Atherton traces this argument through works by major writers like Asai Ryōi, Ihara Saikaku, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ueda Akinari, and Santō Kyōden, focusing on violence during the 250 years of peace ruled over by warriors that is the Edo period"--
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| ISBN | 9780231211550
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