This book explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers – Yosa Buson (1716–83), Ema Saiko (1787–1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) – experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of lyric expression in literati culture and advanced the emergence of modern prose poetry in Japanese literature. Through rigorous close readings, this study changes our understanding of the relationship between lyric form and the representation of self, sense, and feeling in Japanese poetic writing from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The book aims to reach a broad audience, including specialists in East Asian Studies, Anglophone literary studies, and Comparative Literature.
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1 | (24) |
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Late Edo Literati Culture |
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3 | (3) |
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6 | (6) |
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12 | (2) |
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Becoming the Poets They Wanted to Be |
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14 | (2) |
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The Structure of the Present Book |
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16 | (5) |
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21 | (4) |
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2 Yosa Buson and the Colors of a Bunjin Mind |
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25 | (52) |
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Seeing and Imagining Color |
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26 | (7) |
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White, Death, and Lyric Time |
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33 | (7) |
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40 | (9) |
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49 | (4) |
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53 | (20) |
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73 | (4) |
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3 Sense and Sensibility in the Poetry of Ema Saiko |
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77 | (52) |
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78 | (10) |
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88 | (8) |
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There is No Frigate Like a Book |
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96 | (6) |
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102 | (6) |
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108 | (16) |
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124 | (5) |
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4 Representing Life in the Prose Poems of Masaoka Shiki |
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129 | (50) |
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Letting the Brush Go Where It Goes |
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131 | (6) |
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137 | (11) |
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148 | (10) |
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Wandering in the Enigma of Form |
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158 | (18) |
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176 | (3) |
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5 Anxiety and Grief in the Prose Poems of Natsume Soseki |
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179 | (54) |
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181 | (5) |
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186 | (8) |
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194 | (7) |
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201 | (5) |
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206 | (6) |
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The Poetics of Suspension |
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212 | (21) |
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6 Coda: Echoes in the Ether |
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233 | (8) |
References |
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241 | (2) |
Index |
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243 | |
Matthew Mewhinney is Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University, USA, where he teaches Japanese language, literature, and culture. His research interests include lyric poetry and theory, literati culture, narrative, subjectivity, and translation. His scholarship has appeared in Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies, The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, and Japanese Language and Literature.