Description
Book SynopsisDavid C. Atherton offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern Japanese popular literature and the world beyond its pages.
Trade ReviewLucid, eloquent, nuanced, and deeply grounded,
Writing Violence offers a new vision of what it meant to be "creative" in early modern Japan and new tools for teasing out the politics of early modern narrative works. It’s hard to overstate what a revelation this book is. -- Michael Emmerich, author of
The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World LiteratureWriting Violence is a deeply thoughtful and insightful rumination on early modern Japanese literature in its sociohistorical contexts. By addressing issues of cultural, political, and literary form in selected works from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Atherton suggests brilliant new ways of reading and understanding the popular fiction of the age. -- Keller Kimbrough, author of
Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way: Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist Literature of Medieval JapanFreeing early modern revenge and disaster stories from readings of political praise or subversion, Atherton’s bold and theoretically innovative study argues that their form was not formulaic, but an incubator of new perceptual possibilities. In prose that delights and surprises, Atherton shows that Edo authors re-signified violence, remade form, and rethought the power of fiction. -- Vyjayanthi R. Selinger, author of
Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Symbolism in the Literary Construction of Warrior OrderThis beautifully written book offers a fresh perspective on the literary politics of the Edo period. While it focuses on accounts of violence—fires and fights, theft and murder—it is also a lively and humorous introduction to the joys of early modern literature. -- Amy Stanley, author of
Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her WorldWith its rich close readings,
Writing Violence clearly shows the importance of modular construction and “form” to the literature of early modern Japan and provides us with new ways of thinking about the relationship between a text and the outside world. -- Matthew Fraleigh, author of
Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern JapanTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Note to Readers
Introduction: The Problem, Promise, and Politics of Early Modern Literary Form
1. Creative Destruction: Remaking the World in Seventeenth-Century Disaster Literature
2. The Vengeance Variations: Revenge as Form in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku
3. The (Un)crucified Lovers: Adultery, Punishment, and the “Truth” of Transgression
4. Ueda Akinari and the Form of Fiction: In Which a Brother is Celebrated for Beheading His Sister
5. Frontier Violence: Late
Yomihon Form and the Bodies and Bounds of the Realm
Epilogue: Forms in Context, Forms Beyond Context
Notes
Bibliography
Index
