This book explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers – Yosa Buson (1716–83), Ema Saikō (1787–1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) – experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of lyric expression in literati culture and advanced the emergence of modern prose poetry in Japanese literature. Through rigorous close readings, this study changes our understanding of the relationship between lyric form and the representation of self, sense, and feeling in Japanese poetic writing from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The book aims to reach a broad audience, including specialists in East Asian Studies, Anglophone literary studies, and Comparative Literature.
Author(s): Matthew Mewhinney
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 265
City: Cham
Preface
Notes
References
Notes on Style
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Late Edo Literati Culture
Late Edo Lyricism
Meiji Lyricism
Becoming the Poets They Wanted to Be
The Structure of the Present Book
Notes
References
Chapter 2: Yosa Buson and the Colors of a Bunjin Mind
Seeing and Imagining Color
White, Death, and Lyric Time
Ekphrasis upon Ekphrasis
Repetition and Tautology
Form and Longing
Notes
References
Chapter 3: Sense and Sensibility in the Poetry of Ema Saikō
A Room of One’s Own
A Certain Slant of Light
There is No Frigate Like a Book
A Formal Feeling Comes
Poets Light But Lamps
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Representing Life in the Prose Poems of Masaoka Shiki
Letting the Brush Go Where It Goes
Mind and Landscape
A Small Drop of Ink
Wandering in the Enigma of Form
Notes
References
Chapter 5: Anxiety and Grief in the Prose Poems of Natsume Sōseki
A “Haiku-Style Novel”
Pathologies of Motion
Nostalgia and Melancholy
Poetry and Memory
Sensory Renewal
The Poetics of Suspension
Chapter 6: Coda: Echoes in the Ether
Notes
References
Index
