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Gender issues in the Pillow Book and the Essays in Idleness

Gender issues in the Pillow Book and the Essays in Idleness PDF Author: Kati Neubauer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640402790
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 7

Book Description
Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Sociology - Gender Studies, grade: 1,0, Muhlenberg College, course: Introduction to Traditional Japan, language: English, abstract: The Pillow Book (PB) by Sei Shonagon and the Essays in Idleness (EI) by Yoshida Kenko are both considered classic Japanese literature. Both books deal with the court life during their time period. While Sei Shonagon expresses a feminine view and Kenko a masculine opinion, a comparison between the Pillow Book and the Essays in Idleness can be made by bringing their thoughts towards the other sex in contrast to each other. Furthermore, a change in gender roles can be observed. The essay will lay open the reciprocal critics, but also show how deeply both authors fall for the other sex.

Gender issues in the Pillow Book and the Essays in Idleness

Gender issues in the Pillow Book and the Essays in Idleness PDF Author: Kati Neubauer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640402790
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 7

Book Description
Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Sociology - Gender Studies, grade: 1,0, Muhlenberg College, course: Introduction to Traditional Japan, language: English, abstract: The Pillow Book (PB) by Sei Shonagon and the Essays in Idleness (EI) by Yoshida Kenko are both considered classic Japanese literature. Both books deal with the court life during their time period. While Sei Shonagon expresses a feminine view and Kenko a masculine opinion, a comparison between the Pillow Book and the Essays in Idleness can be made by bringing their thoughts towards the other sex in contrast to each other. Furthermore, a change in gender roles can be observed. The essay will lay open the reciprocal critics, but also show how deeply both authors fall for the other sex.

Unbinding The Pillow Book

Unbinding The Pillow Book PDF Author: Gergana Ivanova
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
An eleventh-century classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is frequently paired with The Tale of Genji as one of the most important works in the Japanese canon. Yet it has also been marginalized within Japanese literature for reasons including the gender of its author, the work’s complex textual history, and its thematic and stylistic depth. In Unbinding The Pillow Book, Gergana Ivanova offers a reception history of The Pillow Book and its author from the seventeenth century to the present that shows how various ideologies have influenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions. Ivanova examines how and why The Pillow Book has been read over the centuries, placing it in the multiple contexts in which it has been rewritten, including women’s education, literary scholarship, popular culture, “pleasure quarters,” and the formation of the modern nation-state. Drawing on scholarly commentaries, erotic parodies, instruction manuals for women, high school textbooks, and comic books, she considers its outsized role in ideas about Japanese women writers. Ultimately, Ivanova argues for engaging the work’s plurality in order to achieve a clearer understanding of The Pillow Book and the importance it has held for generations of readers, rather than limiting it to a definitive version or singular meaning. The first book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shōnagon, Unbinding The Pillow Book sheds new light on the construction of gender and sexuality, how women’s writing has been used to create readerships, and why ancient texts continue to play vibrant roles in contemporary cultural production.

Essays in Idleness

Essays in Idleness PDF Author: 吉田兼好
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231112550
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
The Buddhist priest Kenko clung to tradition, Buddhism, and the pleasures of solitude, and the themes he treats in his "Essays, " written sometime between 1330 and 1332, are all suffused with an unspoken acceptance of Buddhist beliefs.

Essays in Idleness

Essays in Idleness PDF Author: Kenko
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141957875
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each shows a different world-view. In the short memoir Hôjôki, Chômei recounts his decision to withdraw from worldly affairs and live as a hermit in a tiny hut in the mountains, contemplating the impermanence of human existence. Kenko, however, displays a fascination with more earthy matters in his collection of anecdotes, advice and observations. From ribald stories of drunken monks to aching nostalgia for the fading traditions of the Japanese court, Essays in Idleness is a constantly surprising work that ranges across the spectrum of human experience. Meredith McKinney's excellent new translation also includes notes and an introduction exploring the spiritual and historical background of the works. Chômei was born into a family of Shinto priests in around 1155, at at time when the stable world of the court was rapidly breaking up. He became an important though minor poet of his day, and at the age of fifty, withdrew from the world to become a tonsured monk. He died in around 1216. Kenkô was born around 1283 in Kyoto. He probably became a monk in his late twenties, and was also noted as a calligrapher. Today he is remembered for his wise and witty aphorisms, 'Essays in Idleness'. Meredith McKinney, who has also translated Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book for Penguin Classics, is a translator of both contemporary and classical Japanese literature. She lived in Japan for twenty years and is currently a visitng fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. '[Essays in Idleness is] a most delightful book, and one that has served as a model of Japanese style and taste since the 17th century. These cameo-like vignettes reflect the importance of the little, fleeting futile things, and each essay is Kenko himself' Asian Student

Fictions of Femininity

Fictions of Femininity PDF Author: Edith Sarra
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804733786
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the “middle ranks” whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities—erotic, political, and literary—of real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists’ creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the author’s negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing. Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish. The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its author’s treatment of the thematics of “seeing and being seen” with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists’ responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.

Ars Erotica

Ars Erotica PDF Author: Richard Shusterman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107004764
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 437

Book Description
Drawing on theories of lovemaking from ancient Asian and Western cultures, this book provides a new aesthetics of erotic love.

Portraits of Edo and Early Modern Japan

Portraits of Edo and Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Gerald Groemer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811373760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
This volume presents a series of five portraits of Edo, the central region of urban space today known as Tokyo, from the great fire of 1657 to the devastating earthquake of 1855. This book endeavors to allow Edo, or at least some of the voices that constituted Edo, to do most of the speaking. These voices become audible in the work of five Japanese eye-witness observers, who notated what they saw, heard, felt, tasted, experienced, and remembered. “An Eastern Stirrup,” presents a vivid portrait of the great conflagration of 1657 that nearly wiped out the city. “Tales of Long Long Ago,” details seventeenth-century warrior-class ways as depicted by a particularly conservative samurai. “The River of Time,” describes the city and its flourishing cultural and economic development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “The Spider’s Reel” looks back at both the attainments and calamities of Edo in the 1780s. Finally, “Disaster Days,” offers a meticulous account of Edo life among the ruins of the catastrophic 1855 tremor. Read in sequence, these five pieces offer a unique “insider’s perspective” on the city of Edo and early modern Japan.

Rice Bowl Women

Rice Bowl Women PDF Author: Dorothy Blair Shimer
Publisher: Signet Book
ISBN: 9780451620828
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
"Over a thousand years of stories and memoirs that reflect the changing status and ongoing struggle of women in the Orient"--Page 1 of cover.

Area Handbook for Japan

Area Handbook for Japan PDF Author: Donald P. Whitaker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 698

Book Description


Early Modern Japanese Literature

Early Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Haruo Shirane
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231507437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1054

Book Description
This is the first anthology ever devoted to early modern Japanese literature, spanning the period from 1600 to 1900, known variously as the Edo or the Tokugawa, one of the most creative epochs of Japanese culture. This anthology, which will be of vital interest to anyone involved in this era, includes not only fiction, poetry, and drama, but also essays, treatises, literary criticism, comic poetry, adaptations from Chinese, folk stories and other non-canonical works. Many of these texts have never been translated into English before, and several classics have been newly translated for this collection. Early Modern Japanese Literature introduces English readers to an unprecedented range of prose fiction genres, including dangibon (satiric sermons), kibyôshi (satiric and didactic picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon (reading books), kokkeibon (books of humor), gôkan (bound books), and ninjôbon (books of romance and sentiment). The anthology also offers a rich array of poetry—waka, haiku, senryû, kyôka, kyôshi—and eleven plays, which range from contemporary domestic drama to historical plays and from early puppet theater to nineteenth century kabuki. Since much of early modern Japanese literature is highly allusive and often elliptical, this anthology features introductions and commentary that provide the critical context for appreciating this diverse and fascinating body of texts. One of the major characteristics of early modern Japanese literature is that almost all of the popular fiction was amply illustrated by wood-block prints, creating an extensive text-image phenomenon. In some genres such as kibyôshi and gôkan the text in fact appeared inside the woodblock image. Woodblock prints of actors were also an important aspect of the culture of kabuki drama. A major feature of this anthology is the inclusion of over 200 woodblock prints that accompanied the original texts and drama.