Description
Book SynopsisEnvisioning the Empress illuminates dynamic and powerful empresses who impacted not only women in their own time but whose influence extended to later generations of royalty, creating a greater role for imperial women and elevating the status of womenâs roles at a crucial juncture in Japanese history. The central focus of this book is visual monarchy, exploring how the empressâ biographies were primarily expressed in visual culture and how their images worked in support of Japanâs imperial policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book begins with a brief overview of premodern and modern imperial women to orient the reader. In each chapter, different media, audiences, and distribution channels for constructing the narrative of feminine imperial power in Japan are addressed alongside biographical information. It is argued that the ultimate purpose of all of these images was to elevate the empress and promote her image as a conventional role model for m
