An age of melodrama
Subtitle: family, gender, and social hierarchy in the turn-of-the- century Japanese novel
By: Ken K. Ito.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 310
ISBN-13: 9780804757775
Subjects: Japanese fiction -- Meiji period, 1868-1912 -- History and criticism
Description: "At the end of the nineteenth century and the 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 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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Melodrama and the family in Meiji Japan: The family and the nation in Hototogisu; title: Love and money in Konjiki yasha; title: Gender and social aspiration in chikyodai; title: The traffic in women and men in Gubijinso; title: In place of a conclusion: Kokoro and the melodramatic imagination.