abstract:In this article, I argue for a reading of the long fiction Plum in the Golden Vase that does not simply excavate the text for facts but instead considers the genres of Ming imaginative literature as theories of social hierarchy. The novel’s sui generis form can be understood, I argue, as a socially symbolic act, particularly relating to the trafficking of human beings and especially of women. The Plum in the Golden Vase places at the very core of society the radical transactability of women. Finally, I interpret seventeenth- century debates about the text—namely, how to rehabilitate the text from its sexual content by reading these debates as relating not merely to aesthetics but also to social theory.摘要:本文以《金瓶梅》為例,論述明代想像性文學的各種文體体現了社會等級 制度的理論。《金瓶梅》自成一體的形式可被理解為與販賣人口,特別是販賣女 性相關的一種社會象徵行為。而十七世紀關於《金瓶梅》的辯論⸺即如何將其從 性愛內容中超拔,而讀作一个報應故事⸺不僅是一种美學探討,而且與社會理論 相關。
abstract:In this article, I argue for a reading of the long fiction Plum in the Golden Vase that does not simply excavate the text for facts but instead considers the genres of Ming imaginative literature as theories of social hierarchy. The novel’s sui generis form can be understood, I argue, as a socially symbolic act, particularly relating to the trafficking of human beings and especially of women. The Plum in the Golden Vase places at the very core of society the radical transactability of women. Finally, I interpret seventeenth- century debates about the text—namely, how to rehabilitate the text from its sexual content by reading these debates as relating not merely to aesthetics but also to social theory.摘要:本文以《金瓶梅》为例,论述明代想像性文学的各种文体体现了社会等级 制度的理论。《金瓶梅》自成一体的形式可被理解为与贩卖人口,特别是贩卖女 性相关的一种社会象征行为。而十七世纪关于《金瓶梅》的辩论⸺即如何将其从 性爱内容中超拔,而读作一个报应故事⸺不仅是一种美学探讨,而且与社会理论 相关。
{"title":"Slavery and Genre in The Plum in the Golden Vase","authors":"Tina Lu","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In this article, I argue for a reading of the long fiction Plum in the Golden Vase that does not simply excavate the text for facts but instead considers the genres of Ming imaginative literature as theories of social hierarchy. The novel’s sui generis form can be understood, I argue, as a socially symbolic act, particularly relating to the trafficking of human beings and especially of women. The Plum in the Golden Vase places at the very core of society the radical transactability of women. Finally, I interpret seventeenth- century debates about the text—namely, how to rehabilitate the text from its sexual content by reading these debates as relating not merely to aesthetics but also to social theory.摘要:本文以《金瓶梅》為例,論述明代想像性文學的各種文體体現了社會等級 制度的理論。《金瓶梅》自成一體的形式可被理解為與販賣人口,特別是販賣女 性相關的一種社會象徵行為。而十七世紀關於《金瓶梅》的辯論⸺即如何將其從 性愛內容中超拔,而讀作一个報應故事⸺不僅是一种美學探討,而且與社會理論 相關。","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"108 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43992772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script by Zev Handel, and: Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia by Peter Francis Kornicki (review)","authors":"Jing Tsu","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0028","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"352 - 359"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47367079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Circling In on “Asian Media Studies”","authors":"Alexander Zahlten","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"289 - 301"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44771317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:In 1872, Maria Luz, a Peruvian ship transporting indentured Chinese “coolies” from Macau to Peru, stopped in the international treaty port of Yokohama, Japan. Amid intense international scrutiny, governor Ōe Taku investigated and then liberated all male coolies on board. However, Ōe left the ship’s captain, Ricardo Hereiro, in possession of an unnamed girl he had purchased in Macau. Since 1872, the Maria Luz incident has been incessantly narrated as a triumph of global abolitionism and evidence of Japan’s progress toward civilization and enlightenment. Historical amnesia has reigned regarding the un-liberated girl. Rethinking the incident from this girl’s perspective reveals less rupture than continuity in the flourishing Asia-Pacific traffic in women and girls—framed as patrilineal kinship and licensed by abolitionists’ gendered double standards. The resulting moral and legal blind spots continue to obscure female enslavement in present-day scholarship.摘要:1872 年のマリア・ルス号事件で、神奈川県長の大江卓が船上の清国人の男の 苦力を解放したが、無名の少女は解放しなかった。少女は忘れ去れ、世界中の奴隷 解放運動と日本の文明開化との勝利として事件が語られてきた。ただ父系性下盛ん な女の奴隷化・人身売買が継続された。
{"title":"Remember Girl Zero: Asia-Pacific Patriliny and Female Slavery","authors":"K. Roebuck","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0018","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In 1872, Maria Luz, a Peruvian ship transporting indentured Chinese “coolies” from Macau to Peru, stopped in the international treaty port of Yokohama, Japan. Amid intense international scrutiny, governor Ōe Taku investigated and then liberated all male coolies on board. However, Ōe left the ship’s captain, Ricardo Hereiro, in possession of an unnamed girl he had purchased in Macau. Since 1872, the Maria Luz incident has been incessantly narrated as a triumph of global abolitionism and evidence of Japan’s progress toward civilization and enlightenment. Historical amnesia has reigned regarding the un-liberated girl. Rethinking the incident from this girl’s perspective reveals less rupture than continuity in the flourishing Asia-Pacific traffic in women and girls—framed as patrilineal kinship and licensed by abolitionists’ gendered double standards. The resulting moral and legal blind spots continue to obscure female enslavement in present-day scholarship.摘要:1872 年のマリア・ルス号事件で、神奈川県長の大江卓が船上の清国人の男の 苦力を解放したが、無名の少女は解放しなかった。少女は忘れ去れ、世界中の奴隷 解放運動と日本の文明開化との勝利として事件が語られてきた。ただ父系性下盛ん な女の奴隷化・人身売買が継続された。","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"227 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45489929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:In this article, I seek to understand the longevity of Korean slavery, the social and economic foundation of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). The tension of the competing economic needs of the state and yangban elites versus the state’s ideological commitment to benevolent governance led the state to formulate pliable policies on slavery. Legal cases concerning slaves’ oppression by slave owners reveal that owners exercised tyrannical power over their slaves. Yet laws also restrained slave owners in their dealings with slaves. Slaves, though subject to constant exploitation and unjust social conditions, took advantage of their economic, social, and familial resources as well as their legal rights in managing their precarious lives. This structural malleability enabling slaves’ agency created a form of slavery in Korea that endured for centuries.초록:이 논문은 조선왕조의 사회 경제적 근간을 이룬 노비제도가 장기지속된 원인을 노비들이 자신들이 갖고 있는 사회 경제적 자원과 법적 수단들을 이용 하여 자신들의 삶을 주체적으로 영위해 나갈 수 있게 한 구조적 유연성에서 찾 는다.
abstract:In this article, I seek to understand the longevity of Korean slavery, the social and economic foundation of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). The tension of the competing economic needs of the state and yangban elites versus the state’s ideological commitment to benevolent governance led the state to formulate pliable policies on slavery. Legal cases concerning slaves’ oppression by slave owners reveal that owners exercised tyrannical power over their slaves. Yet laws also restrained slave owners in their dealings with slaves. Slaves, though subject to constant exploitation and unjust social conditions, took advantage of their economic, social, and familial resources as well as their legal rights in managing their precarious lives. This structural malleability enabling slaves’agency created a form of slavery in Korea that endured for centries.摘录：这篇论文认为，构成朝鲜王朝社会经济根基的奴婢制度之所以长期持续下去，是因为奴婢们可以利用自己拥有的社会经济资源和法律手段，主体性地过上自己的生活。在结构灵活性上寻找。
{"title":"Resilience of Korean Slavery: Tyrannical Owners, Resourceful Slaves, and the Equivocal State","authors":"S. Kim","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In this article, I seek to understand the longevity of Korean slavery, the social and economic foundation of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). The tension of the competing economic needs of the state and yangban elites versus the state’s ideological commitment to benevolent governance led the state to formulate pliable policies on slavery. Legal cases concerning slaves’ oppression by slave owners reveal that owners exercised tyrannical power over their slaves. Yet laws also restrained slave owners in their dealings with slaves. Slaves, though subject to constant exploitation and unjust social conditions, took advantage of their economic, social, and familial resources as well as their legal rights in managing their precarious lives. This structural malleability enabling slaves’ agency created a form of slavery in Korea that endured for centuries.초록:이 논문은 조선왕조의 사회 경제적 근간을 이룬 노비제도가 장기지속된 원인을 노비들이 자신들이 갖고 있는 사회 경제적 자원과 법적 수단들을 이용 하여 자신들의 삶을 주체적으로 영위해 나갈 수 있게 한 구조적 유연성에서 찾 는다.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"133 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49659877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:I identify the institution of government courtesans in Chosŏn Korea as state slavery. Government courtesans, like other government slaves and like private household slaves, were legally defined as chattel property in Chosŏn. Yet courtesans differed from those other types of slaves because their performances—labor mandated by the state— were constantly questioned and delegitimized by the government of nearly every Chosŏn king. Based on an examination of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century court debates about abolishing the courtesan system, I argue that the government’s repeated failures to abolish the use of courtesans produced the Chosŏn courtesan system as an illegitimate, temporary, and dispensable state apparatus. Paradoxically, the repeated designation of ongoing courtesan participation in royal, diplomatic, and military events as temporary in fact perpetuated courtesan slavery, even as the nominal illegitimacy removed any legal, social, or moral justification for the system.초록:이 논문은 조선 정부에서 국가 노예제인 관기 제도를 폐지하기 위한 논쟁 을 거듭했으나 매번 실패하는 지속적 과정이 관기 제도를 부적절하고, 임시적이 며, 제거 가능한 조직으로 만드는 담론적 효과를 창출했으며, 이를 통해 역설적 으로 국가 노예제의 권력 위계 질서를 영속화했다는 점에 대해 살펴본다.
abstract:I identify the institution of government courtesans in Chosŏn Korea as state slavery. Government courtesans, like other government slaves and like private household slaves, were legally defined as chattel property in Chosŏn. Yet courtesans differed from those other types of slaves because their performances—labor mandated by the state— were constantly questioned and delegitimized by the government of nearly every Chosŏn king. Based on an examination of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century court debates about abolishing the courtesan system, I argue that the government’s repeated failures to abolish the use of courtesans produced the Chosŏn courtesan system as an illegitimate, temporary, and dispensable state apparatus. Paradoxically, the repeated designation of ongoing courtesan participation in royal, diplomatic, and military events as temporary in fact perpetuated courtesan slavery, even as the nominal illegitimacy removed any legal, social,or moral justification for the system.摘录：这篇论文讲述了朝鲜政府为废除国家奴隶制官妓制度而反复争论，但每次都失败的持续过程，创造了使官妓制度成为不恰当、临时、可移除组织的话语效果。通过这一点，我们来回顾一下，从反面来看，国家奴隶制的权力等级秩序得到了延续。
{"title":"Temporarily for Your Majesty: Debates on Abolishing Courtesan Slavery in Chosŏn Korea","authors":"Hyunsun Park","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0017","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:I identify the institution of government courtesans in Chosŏn Korea as state slavery. Government courtesans, like other government slaves and like private household slaves, were legally defined as chattel property in Chosŏn. Yet courtesans differed from those other types of slaves because their performances—labor mandated by the state— were constantly questioned and delegitimized by the government of nearly every Chosŏn king. Based on an examination of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century court debates about abolishing the courtesan system, I argue that the government’s repeated failures to abolish the use of courtesans produced the Chosŏn courtesan system as an illegitimate, temporary, and dispensable state apparatus. Paradoxically, the repeated designation of ongoing courtesan participation in royal, diplomatic, and military events as temporary in fact perpetuated courtesan slavery, even as the nominal illegitimacy removed any legal, social, or moral justification for the system.초록:이 논문은 조선 정부에서 국가 노예제인 관기 제도를 폐지하기 위한 논쟁 을 거듭했으나 매번 실패하는 지속적 과정이 관기 제도를 부적절하고, 임시적이 며, 제거 가능한 조직으로 만드는 담론적 효과를 창출했으며, 이를 통해 역설적 으로 국가 노예제의 권력 위계 질서를 영속화했다는 점에 대해 살펴본다.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"203 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48318744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 81 (2021): 370–375 that leave people isolated from their cities, sites that even now offer little space or tolerance for heterogeneity. These novellas “transport both female narrators/protagonists back in time and space to show the contradicting experiences of colonialism and modernity by inscribing their experiences onto the city” (p. 165). In addition, both critique the standard binaries of resistance versus submission and nationalist versus antinationalist. As Kim argues, these post colonial novellas “pointedly question how to make sense of the Japanese colonial presence in the putatively postcolonial while also challenging the applicability of the very idea of the postcolonial in contemporary Seoul and Taipei” (p. 165). Urban Modernities brims with insights. It is a timely monograph that will be of great interest to scholars and students in a range of fields. This book is well-researched and clearly written. It skillfully intertwines Western theory while at the same time eschewing jargon. Drawing from a range of scholarship on East Asia in English, Chinese, and Korean, Kim’s book advances multiple fields, including the still relatively young field of modern intra-Asian comparative literature. It will almost certainly inspire significant transnational and transregional scholarship.
{"title":"The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: the Untold History by Monica Kim (review)","authors":"Grace Huxford","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 81 (2021): 370–375 that leave people isolated from their cities, sites that even now offer little space or tolerance for heterogeneity. These novellas “transport both female narrators/protagonists back in time and space to show the contradicting experiences of colonialism and modernity by inscribing their experiences onto the city” (p. 165). In addition, both critique the standard binaries of resistance versus submission and nationalist versus antinationalist. As Kim argues, these post colonial novellas “pointedly question how to make sense of the Japanese colonial presence in the putatively postcolonial while also challenging the applicability of the very idea of the postcolonial in contemporary Seoul and Taipei” (p. 165). Urban Modernities brims with insights. It is a timely monograph that will be of great interest to scholars and students in a range of fields. This book is well-researched and clearly written. It skillfully intertwines Western theory while at the same time eschewing jargon. Drawing from a range of scholarship on East Asia in English, Chinese, and Korean, Kim’s book advances multiple fields, including the still relatively young field of modern intra-Asian comparative literature. It will almost certainly inspire significant transnational and transregional scholarship.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"370 - 375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47428439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E philosophers, from ancients like Aristotle to Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, no matter how radically different their attitudes toward slaveholding, articulated a mutually constitutive relationship between “freedom” and “slavery.” Each recognizes the character of the other in its negative reflection; resulting, according to Hegel, in a (life-or-death) negotiation between extremes.1 For the slave societies of Ancient Rome or the Atlantic world, a theoretical bifurcation of the population reigned. The line between free and unfree proved politically useful not just to those who sought to preserve the institution of slavery but to later abolitionists as well. It demarcated the lines of struggle and the wrongs of slavery. By highlighting how the proposed dichotomy fails to capture the multiplicity of forms slavery takes around the world—and in the East, Inner, and Southeast Asian contexts described in this special issue—I do not wish to undercut this politics of liberation or to minimize the absolute degradation enacted by slave traders and slaveholders. Close examination of global practices of enslavement, however, tests the proposition that these two concepts need each other. The supposedly tidy binary between free and unfree has become a kind of zombie idea, one that scholars of slavery must always and repeatedly dispatch, before proceeding to describe the evidence of exploitation they find in the archive at hand. And, it is not so much that the two terms are not opposites—for in many ways, they are—but rather that, as we encounter freedom or slavery in the world, the concepts operate in radically diverging ways.
{"title":"That Dynamic Spectrum","authors":"J. Ransmeier","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"E philosophers, from ancients like Aristotle to Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, no matter how radically different their attitudes toward slaveholding, articulated a mutually constitutive relationship between “freedom” and “slavery.” Each recognizes the character of the other in its negative reflection; resulting, according to Hegel, in a (life-or-death) negotiation between extremes.1 For the slave societies of Ancient Rome or the Atlantic world, a theoretical bifurcation of the population reigned. The line between free and unfree proved politically useful not just to those who sought to preserve the institution of slavery but to later abolitionists as well. It demarcated the lines of struggle and the wrongs of slavery. By highlighting how the proposed dichotomy fails to capture the multiplicity of forms slavery takes around the world—and in the East, Inner, and Southeast Asian contexts described in this special issue—I do not wish to undercut this politics of liberation or to minimize the absolute degradation enacted by slave traders and slaveholders. Close examination of global practices of enslavement, however, tests the proposition that these two concepts need each other. The supposedly tidy binary between free and unfree has become a kind of zombie idea, one that scholars of slavery must always and repeatedly dispatch, before proceeding to describe the evidence of exploitation they find in the archive at hand. And, it is not so much that the two terms are not opposites—for in many ways, they are—but rather that, as we encounter freedom or slavery in the world, the concepts operate in radically diverging ways.","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"267 - 273"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42708182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An essay I read in graduate school—Peter Kornicki’s “The Survival of Tokugawa Fiction in the Meiji Period,” published forty years ago in this very journal—provided me with my first intimation that early modern Japanese literature was still popular in the modern era.1 It has taken the field considerable time to take seriously and to explore fully the implications of this survival, but the effort to find continuity amid change across the once unbridgeable Tokugawa–Meiji divide has now gained a great deal of traction. Daniel Poch’s Licentious Fictions, a bold, ambitious, and deeply researched monograph, takes a prominent place among these studies. Focusing on the historically specific discourse about ninjō 人情 (lit. human emotion; treated in the book as a form of desire), Poch’s book traces the “narrative practices surrounding ninjō” (p. 4) across a long nineteenth century, from the late Tokugawa era to the final decade of the Meiji period. Its focal points are the literary projects of Kyokutei Bakin 曲亭馬琴 (1767–1848), Tsubouchi Shōyō 坪内逍遥 (1859–1935), and Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916). The book details the need to unleash the representation of desire in fiction, as well as the urge to control its unruly aspects, with a didactic framework that legitimizes some expressions of desire while making others illicit. The specifics of these impulses differ depending on the writer and the historical era. Poch’s book is adept at handling the variability and historical specificity of these twin claims on fiction to unleash and control desires. It also convincingly reveals continuity across the entire century. Poch’s attention to historical specificity is evident in chapter 1, which presents a wide-ranging account of the “interlocked historical layers that informed the understanding of ninjō in the nineteenthcentury Japanese novel” (p. 29). This historically specific discourse on desire was influenced by the import of vernacular Chinese fiction into
{"title":"Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch (review)","authors":"Timothy J. Van Compernolle","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0001","url":null,"abstract":"An essay I read in graduate school—Peter Kornicki’s “The Survival of Tokugawa Fiction in the Meiji Period,” published forty years ago in this very journal—provided me with my first intimation that early modern Japanese literature was still popular in the modern era.1 It has taken the field considerable time to take seriously and to explore fully the implications of this survival, but the effort to find continuity amid change across the once unbridgeable Tokugawa–Meiji divide has now gained a great deal of traction. Daniel Poch’s Licentious Fictions, a bold, ambitious, and deeply researched monograph, takes a prominent place among these studies. Focusing on the historically specific discourse about ninjō 人情 (lit. human emotion; treated in the book as a form of desire), Poch’s book traces the “narrative practices surrounding ninjō” (p. 4) across a long nineteenth century, from the late Tokugawa era to the final decade of the Meiji period. Its focal points are the literary projects of Kyokutei Bakin 曲亭馬琴 (1767–1848), Tsubouchi Shōyō 坪内逍遥 (1859–1935), and Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916). The book details the need to unleash the representation of desire in fiction, as well as the urge to control its unruly aspects, with a didactic framework that legitimizes some expressions of desire while making others illicit. The specifics of these impulses differ depending on the writer and the historical era. Poch’s book is adept at handling the variability and historical specificity of these twin claims on fiction to unleash and control desires. It also convincingly reveals continuity across the entire century. Poch’s attention to historical specificity is evident in chapter 1, which presents a wide-ranging account of the “interlocked historical layers that informed the understanding of ninjō in the nineteenthcentury Japanese novel” (p. 29). This historically specific discourse on desire was influenced by the import of vernacular Chinese fiction into","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"393 - 397"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42266410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan by Franz Prichard (review)","authors":"Michael P. Cronin","doi":"10.1353/jas.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29948,"journal":{"name":"HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES","volume":"81 1","pages":"398 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46396942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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