Textures of mourning : calligraphy, mortality, and The tale of Genji scrolls
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Textures of mourning : calligraphy, mortality, and The tale of Genji scrolls
(Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies, no. 84)
University of Michigan Press, 2018
- : hardcover
- Other Title
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Textures of mourning : calligraphy, mortality, & The tale of Genji scrolls
Available at 8 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 309-322) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
How does mourning emerge to reshape Japanese visual culture? Textures of Mourning addresses this question by examining engrossing literary and visual portrayals of death and its aftermath from The Tale of Genji and its adaptations. Contending that the work of mourning unfolds through interwoven practices of reading, writing, painting, and public exhibition, Reginald Jackson charts how mourning spurs artistic composition, triggers visceral responses, and seduces spectators in both premodern and contemporary Japan. Textures of Mourning delineates the intimate relationship between mourning and reading at three historical tipping points: the height of imperial power in the early eleventh century, when the literary masterwork The Tale of Genji (1008) was written; the collapse of imperial hegemony in the late-twelfth century, when Genji's most famous handscroll adaptation was composed (1150); and the post-bubble recessionary context in which those handscrolls were refashioned as the "Resurrected Genji Handscrolls" (2006). As material objects wrought at comparable moments of social upheaval, these texts become vehicles through which to mourn perished ideals of vitality, prosperity, and belonging.
Textures of Mourning is the first full-length manuscript in English to investigate these texts' complex relationship across eras. By analyzing dozens of sumptuous images, the book pursues mortality's progression over four sections-"Dying," "Decomposing," "Mourning," and "Resurrecting"-each of which contextualizes factual and fictional accounts of reckoning with death to discern the mechanics of mourning's labor. A major intervention of the book is to theorize how the riveting opacity, coarse materiality, and skewed temporality of premodern forms trouble modern regimes of looking, feeling, and knowing. Drawing upon scholarship in premodern Japanese literary studies, art history, and performance studies, the book's innovative trans-disciplinary readings reorient psychoanalytic criticism and performance theory to map the fluctuating topography of calligraphic gestures.
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