The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing

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Paul Gordon Schalow, Janet A. Walker
Stanford University Press, 1996 - 511 pages
This volume has a dual purpose. As a study of Japanese literature, it aims to define the state of Japanese literary studies in the field of women s writing and to point to directions for future research and inquiry. As a study of women s writing, it presents cross-cultural interpretations of Japanese material of relevance to contemporary work in gender studies and comparative literature. The essays demonstrate various critical approaches to the tradition of Japanese women s writing--from a consideration of theoretical issues of gendered writing in classical and modern literature to a consideration of the themes and styles of a number of important contemporary writers.

Feminist literary critics have generally defined women s discursive practice in terms of four major gender-related contexts: literary-historical, biological, experiential, and cultural. Accordingly, the thirteen essays in the volume are divided into four parts. Part I locates women writers within Japanese literary history; Part II shows ways in which modern women writers have "written the body in Japan; Part III gives examples of tropes and genres used to write about female experience; and Part IV depicts how gender intersects with other social and cultural contexts in Japanese women s writing.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Without Beginning Without End
19
In the Interstices of Gender and Criticism
41
The Origins of the Concept of Womens Literature
74
The Body in Contemporary Japanese Womens Fiction
119
Translation and Reproduction in Enchi Fumikos
165
The Quest for Jouissance in Takahashi Takakos Texts
205
The Question
239
Hayashi Kyōko and the Gender of Ground Zero
262
The Female Destiny
293
The Wandering Woman
329
Struggles over
352
Power and Gender in the Narratives of Yamada Eimi
425
Selected Bibliography of Japanese Womens Writing
461
Index
495
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Page 423 - Man Woman Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it carries us, beneath all its figures, wherever discourse is organized. If we read or speak, the same thread or double braid is leading us throughout literature, philosophy, criticism, centuries of representation and reflection.

About the author (1996)

Paul Gordon Schalow is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at Rutgers University. He is the translator of Ihara Saikaku's The Great Mirror of Male Love (Stanford, 1990). Janet A. Walker is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism.

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