Description
Book SynopsisImagining Harmony explores the diverse roles that poetry played for eighteenth-century Japanese intellectuals as an embodiment of human emotion, a form of linguistic and philological training, and a means for accessing the ancient cultures that they turned to as the source of their political ideals.
Trade Review"[I]nsightful . . . This meticulously researched and carefully edited volume is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the eighteenth century and its legacy. The arguments are laid out clearly in a jargon-free manner accessible to nonspecialists, for whom the study will doubtless also have great appeal." -- Roger K. Thomas *
Journal of Japanese Studies *
"The sophistication, accessibility, subtlety, and clarity of Flueckiger's analysis makes for a valuable contribution to the literary and intellectual history of early modern Japan. His exploration of the relationship of poetry to music will be fresh to Western readers, and his treatment of Hattori Nankaku and Dazai Shundai, still both understudied outside Japan, will also be welcomed by specialists." -- James McMullen, Fellow Emeritus, Pembroke College * Oxford *
"This work will undoubtedly and immediately emerge as a fresh starting point for studies of both literary and sociopolitical thought in Tokugawa Japan. The scholarship is careful, grounded in sound theory, and bold in its revision of long-held interpretations." -- Lawrence E. Marceau * University of Auckland *
"The book is a superb contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century poetics and the place of poetry in creating community as imagined by an array of the age's most accomplished thinkers. Flueckiger has provided an important corrective to the Maruyama thesis and has challenged the accepted wisdom of a shelfful of other secondary scholarship in both English and Japanese. This likely makes
Imagining Harmony the most important piece of English-language scholarship on either Tokugawa Confucianism or nativism published in the last decade." -- Peter Nosco *
Monumenta Nipponica *
