| An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-Of-The-Century Japanese Novel Contributor(s): Ito, Ken K. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0804757771 ISBN-13: 9780804757775 Publisher: Stanford University Press OUR PRICE: $71.25 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: September 2008 Annotation: At the turn of the last century, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked exorbitant emotions. The Age of Melodrama examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. First, using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it shows how these ideologically active texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certitude in a moment of social transformation. Second, it examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies surrounding the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period (1868-1912) generated a plethora of alternative models of family that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could be connected in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses that surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Asian - Japanese |
| Dewey: 895.634 |
| LCCN: 2008011776 |
| Physical Information: 1" H x 6.2" W x 9" (1.25 lbs) 328 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Japanese |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. An Age of Melodrama examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. It then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses that surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture. |