Stage and Page in Early-Modern Japan

Abstract

Wondrous Brutal Fictions and Publishing the Stage will together expand and enrich the scholarly conversation on the theater of Tokugawa-period Japan and its interfaces with various genres of literature and the visual arts. The former volume consists of translations by R. Keller Kimbrough of seventeenth-century sekkyō and ko-jōruri (old jōruri) preceded by an informative and insightful introduction. It will be of great interest to scholars specializing in early-modern Japanese literature, history, and religion, and would lend itself to inclusion in reading lists for both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses. Publishing the Stage, edited by Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki, gathers together a wide-ranging assortment of papers on the symbiotic relationship between theater and publishing in Edo- and early Meiji-period Japan, all presented in March 2011 at an interdisciplinary conference held at the Center for Asian Studies of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Its eleven essays (seven written in English and four in Japanese) will be of use not only to scholars in the fields of Japanese literature and performance but also to historians and specialists in art history.