Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts
ISBN-10
0231152817
ISBN-13
9780231152815
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
336
Language
English
Published
2013-03-05
Publisher
Columbia University Press
Author
Haruo Shirane

Description

"Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Shirane discusses textual, cultivated, material, performative, and gastronomic representations of nature. He reveals how this kind of 'secondary nature,' which flourished in Japan's urban environment, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment when it began to recede from view. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane also clarifies the use of natural and seasonal topics as well as the changes in their cultural associations and functions across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world."--Back cover.

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