Daniel Poch

Licentious Fictions (eBook, ePUB)

Ninjo and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjo-literally "human emotion," but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction's capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior and a dangerous force transgressing social norms, ninjo became a focal point for debates about the role of the novel and a key motor propelling narrative plots.

In Licentious Fictions, Daniel Poch investigates the significance of ninjo in defining the literary modernity of nineteenth-century Japan. He explores how cultural anxieties about the power of literature in mediating emotions and desire shaped Japanese narrative from the late Edo through the Meiji period. Poch argues that the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjo, complicated them by integrating them into new cultural and literary concepts. He offers close readings of a broad array of late Edo- and Meiji-period narrative and critical sources, examining how they shed light on the great intensification of the concern surrounding ninjo. In addition to proposing a new theoretical outlook on emotion, Licentious Fictions challenges the divide between early modern and modern Japanese literary studies by conceptualizing the nineteenth century as a continuous literary-historical space.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 24. Dezember 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780231550468
• Artikelnr.: 56835821

Autorenporträt

Daniel Poch is assistant professor of Japanese literature in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Part I: Ninj
and the Early-Modern Novel 1. From Ninj
to the Ninj
bon: Toward the Licentious Novel 2. Questioning the Idealist Novel: Virtue and Desire in Nans
Satomi hakkenden Part II: The Age of Literary Reform 3. Translating Love in the Early-Meiji Novel: Ninj
bon and Yomihon in the Age of Enlightenment 4. Historicizing Literary Reform: Sh
setsu shinzui, Translation, and the Civilizational Politics of Ninj
5. The Novel's Failure: Sh
y
and the Aporia of Realism and Idealism Part III: Late-Meiji Questionings 6. Ninj
and the Late-Meiji Novel: Recontextualizing S
seki's Literary Project Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index