You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Doyen of comparative literature at Tokyo University, this is one of Hirakawa's life-long projects. It aims to illuminate a pathway to a better understanding of an age-old and controversial debate that is both provocative and pragmatic.
None
Offering a variety of critical approaches to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, this collection provides a transnational view of the emergence and flowering of the Gothic. The essays expand on now well-known approaches to the Gothic (such as those that concentrate exclusively on race, gender, or nation) by focusing on international issues: religious traditions, social reform, economic and financial pitfalls, manifest destiny and expansion, changing concepts of nationhood, and destabilizing moments of empire-building. By examining a wide array of Gothic texts, including novels, drama, and poetry, the contributors present the Gothic not as a peripheral, marginal genre, ...
This book examines the transnational phenomenon of Japonisme in the exoticist and “autoexoticist” literature of the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the way in which reciprocal processes of transcultural acquisition – by Japan and from Japan – were portrayed in the medium of literature, the book illustrates how literary Japonisme and the wider processes whereby Japan, with its alien exotic culture and unique refined aestheticism, was absorbing Western civilization in its own way in the late nineteenth century at the same time as the phenomenon of Japonisme was occurring in Western fine arts, which were inspired by traditional Japanese artistic practices. Specifically, the book focuses on the literary works of Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti, who travelled from France and America, respectively, to Japan, and Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki, who in turn went, respectively, to Germany and England from Japan. Exploring the eclectic hybridity of Japan’s modernization during the late nineteenth century, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature.
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) has long been marginalised as a failed Victorian Romantic whose writings on Japan were poetic but inconsequential; as a person, he emerges as a one-dimensional neurotic. In this new study, based on a wealth of hitherto unpublished sources, as well as a fresh reading of Hearn's writings, Paul Murray reveals a multi-faceted character of considerable depth, intelligence and literary skill. This is a book, therefore, that will appeal on many levels. The story of Hearn's life makes fascinating reading; his fantastic journey took him from conception outside marriage on a Greek island to a protected upbringing in Dublin; from a Gothic education in England to Cincinnati in...
This first full length critical biography of one of the most significant figures in Japanese Studies in the last hundred years is based on an earlier work published in Japanese (Iwanami Shoten, 1990). Ota sees Chamberlain as a giant of his period, both academically and intellectually. His achievements include the first publication of a translation of the Kojiki, his pioneering work as the 'father' of Japanese linguistics, and the acclaimed Things Japanese which served generations as an everyman encyclopaedia. However, Ota also acknowledges Chamberlain's vision in recognising the distinctive merits and strengths of Japanese society and culture at a time of xenophobic Europeanism, made possible by the fact that Chamberlain was ahead of his times as a multi-lingual and multi-cultural personality.
What is lost in translation may be a war, a world, a way of life. A unique look into the nineteenth-century clash of empires from both sides of the earthshaking encounter, this book reveals the connections between international law, modern warfare, and comparative grammar--and their influence on the shaping of the modern world in Eastern and Western terms. The Clash of Empires brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and c...
In ten articles written and mostly published between 1977 and 1994, Martin (modern history, U. of Freiburg) explains that the similarities between Japan and Germany go back nearly to the foundation of the two national states, in 1869 and 1871 respectively. He documents how after trying several other approaches, the Japanese adopted the Prusso-German model of modernization, and restructured the constitution, government administration, the legal and education systems, the army, and finally the social system. They both recovered from the depression of the 1930s by armament production and supra- nationalist ideology, and were then natural allies by the time World War II began. He traces their continuing parallel development through the postwar era to the present. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This will appeal to anyone wishing to enrich their understanding of Japan, those with an interest in Hearn, Irish literary tradition and life and literature in a cross-cultural context.
Comparative Criticism addresses itself to the questions of literary theory and criticism. This new volume looks at the Humanist Tradition in the Twentieth Century and articles will include: The Book in the Totalitarian Context; Lorenzo Valla and Changing Perceptions of Renaissance Humanism; Hitler's Berlin; Civilisation and barbarism: an anthropological approach; Walter Pater to Adrian Stokes: psychoanalysis and humanism; Art History and Humanist Tradition in the Stefan George Circle. The winning entries in the 1999-2000 BCLA/BCLT translation competition are also published.