Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) - Softcover

Burns, Susan L

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822331721 ISBN 13: 9780822331728

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Burns Susan L

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Críticas:

"In Before the Nation Susan L. Burns offers rock-solid research on a crucial topic in the intellectual history of state-formation and nationalism in Japan."-J. Victor Koschmann, author of Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan "Before the Nation is a significant addition to the field of Japanese intellectual history and a very fine book."-Leslie Pincus, author of Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics

Reseña del editor:

Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country." Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity.Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga's Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers-Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe-who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate-involving history, language, and subjectivity-with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0822331721
• ISBN 13: 9780822331728
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 294