Manga from the floating world : comicbook culture and the kibyōshi of Edo Japan

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Manga from the floating world : comicbook culture and the kibyōshi of Edo Japan

Adam L. Kern

(Harvard East Asian monographs, 279)

Harvard University Asia Center , Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2019

2nd ed. with a new pref

  • : pbk
  • : hardcover

Other Title

浮世からのコミックス : 江戸時代の黄表紙と漫画文化

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Note

Some kibyoshi items translated from Japanese

Pt. II. translations (p. [251]-506) issued back-to-back with inverted text

Includes bibliographical references (p. [509]-524) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyoshi, a genre of woodblock-printed comic book widely read in late-eighteenth-century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced and consumed with three annotated translations of works by major author-artist Santo Kyoden (1761-1816) that closely reproduce the experience of encountering the originals, Adam Kern offers a sustained close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. The kibyoshi, Kern argues, became an influential form of political satire that seemed poised to transform the uniquely Edoesque brand of urban commoner culture into something more, perhaps even a national culture, until the shogunal government intervened. Based on extensive research using primary sources in their original Edo editions, the volume is copiously illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections. It serves as an introduction not only to the kibyoshi but also to the genre's readers and critics, narratological conventions, modes of visuality, format, and relationship to the modern Japanese manga and to the popular literature and wit of Edo. Filled with graphic puns and caricatures, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the more experienced student of Japanese cultural history-and anyone interested in the global history of comics, graphic novels, and manga.

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