Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons

Nature, Literature, and the Arts

AvHaruo Shirane

E-bok

Engelska, 2012

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Beskrivning

Elegant representations of nature, explicitly the four seasons, fill a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and annual observances. Haruo Shirane shows, for the first time, how, when, and why this occurred and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings these representations embodied.Refuting the long held belief that this phenomenon reflects agrarian origins, this book demonstrates how elegant representations of the four seasons first emerged in an urban environment among nobility in the eight century. They became highly codified and then spread to different social classes, eventually settling in popular culture and the pleasure quarters. Shirane accounts for all types of manifestations: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh drama, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, frequently fostered a sense of harmony with the natural world—just at the point at which it was receding. Eventually, alternative representations of nature derived from farm villages and elsewhere began to intersect with these elegant representations in the capital, creating a complex web of competing associations.Anyone with an interest in Japanese visual arts, literature, cultural history, and social customs will relish this book, which illuminates the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts. Shirane explicates nature's complex codification, especially the use of images, the seasons to which they were attached, and the changes in cultural associations across history, genre, and community. His fascinating research shows these seasons to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2012-03-20
Språk:Engelska
Filformat:EPUB
Kopieringsskydd:LCP
ISBN:9780231526524
Förlag:Columbia University Press

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Haruo Shirane is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Japanese literature, including, most recently, The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales; Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production; Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600; Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 16001900; Classical Japanese: A Grammar; and Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho.

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"The heart of the book is in its descriptions--grounded in careful exegesis according to what we know from historical sources--of prominent seasonal images associated with Japanese poetry and culture. It should be a valuable tool for anyone interested in Japanese poetry and literature and for those interested in art and art history, the tea ceremony, flower-arranging, clothing, cuisine, and a variety of other Japanese customs. Haruo Shirane's work offers a wealth of valuable information and many interesting and original insights." -Steven Carter, Stanford University