Description
Book SynopsisEmphasizes the astonishing innovations in diction and style, not to mention content, in Yosano Akiko’s work that transformed the
tanka genre from a hidebound and conservative mode of verse to something much more daring and modern.
Trade Review“This work brings together and builds on the extensive scholarship in Japan and the budding scholarship in the West on Yosano Akiko, her circle, and modern
tanka. It manages to grapple with an enormous body of work and also bring the opinions of a variety of critics and critical approaches to bear. The translations are often the first of these poems into English, and they are extremely appealing.” —Laurel Rasplica Rodd, University of Colorado Boulder
“The book gives a detailed exegesis of the poetry of the Myōjō school, whose key founders Yosano Hiroshi, Yosano Akiko, and Yamakawa Tomiko were leaders in the modernization of the
tanka, whose importance to the history of Japanese literature cannot be overstated. Morton is clearly informed by and builds on an encyclopedic review of Japanese-language scholarship on the topic, providing an enormous service to the field.” —Julia Bullock, Emory University
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Romantic Love in The Sun 1895-1905
- Chapter 2: Romantic Love in The Woman’s Magazine 1897-1904
- Chapter 3: The Birth of the Modern: Yosano Akiko and Tekkan’s Verse Revolution
- Chapter 4: Inventing Modernist Poetry: Yosano Akiko’s Rewriting of Tradition
- Chapter 5: Romantic Love in Myōjō Exchange Verse
- Chapter 6: Love as Literary Construct: Erotic Tropes in the Poetry of Yosano Akiko, Tekkan, and Yamakawa Tomiko
- Chapter 7: Rewriting Texts as Text: A Study of the “White Lily” Chapter of Tangled Hair
- Chapter 8: Yosano Akiko’s Tangled Hair, Modernity and Kansai Culture
- Chapter 9: The Poetics of Naturalism: Yosano Akiko and Motherhood
- Chapter 10: The Canonicity of Yosano Akiko’s Tangled Hair
- Reflections
- Bibliography
- Index
