An Age of Melodrama
副标题: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel
ISBN: 9780804757775
出版社: Stanford University Press
出版年: 2008-09-03
页数: 368
定价: USD 55.00
装帧: Hardcover
内容简介
At the end of the nineteenth century and 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 social 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.