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An illustrated guide to one of the most enduring masterworks of
world literature Written in the eleventh century by the Japanese
noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of
prose and poetry that is widely considered the world's first novel.
Melissa McCormick provides a unique companion to Murasaki's tale
that combines discussions of all fifty-four of its chapters with
paintings and calligraphy from the Genji Album (1510) in the
Harvard Art Museums, the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations
known to exist. In this book, the album's colorful painting and
calligraphy leaves are fully reproduced for the first time,
followed by McCormick's insightful essays that analyze the Genji
story and the album's unique combinations of word and image. This
stunning compendium also includes English translations and Japanese
transcriptions of the album's calligraphy, enabling a holistic
experience of the work for readers today. In an introduction to the
volume, McCormick tells the fascinating stories of the individuals
who created the Genji Album in the sixteenth century, from the
famous court painter who executed the paintings and the aristocrats
who brushed the calligraphy to the work's warrior patrons and the
poet-scholars who acted as their intermediaries. Beautifully
illustrated, this book serves as an invaluable guide for readers
interested in The Tale of Genji, Japanese literature, and the
captivating visual world of Japan's most celebrated work of
fiction.
Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan is the first
book-length study to focus on short-story small scrolls (ko-e), one
of the most complex but visually appealing forms of early Japanese
painting. Small picture scrolls emerged in Japan during the
fourteenth century and were unusual in constituting approximately
half the height of the narrative handscrolls that had been produced
and appreciated in Japan for centuries. Melissa McCormick's history
of the small scroll tells the story of its emergence and highlights
its unique pictorial qualities and production contexts in ways that
illuminate the larger history of Japanese narrative painting. Small
scrolls illustrated short stories of personal transformation, a new
literary form suffused with an awareness of the Buddhist notion of
the illusory nature of worldly desires. The most accomplished
examples of the genre resulted from the collaboration of the
imperial court painter Tosa Mitsunobu (active ca. 1469-1522) and
the erudite Kyoto aristocrat Sanjonishi Sanetaka (1455-1537).
McCormick unveils the cultural milieu and the politics of patronage
through diaries, letters, and archival materials, exposing the many
layers of allusion that were embedded in these scrolls, while
offering close readings that articulate the artistic language
developed to an extreme level of refinement. In doing so, McCormick
also offers the first sustained examination in English of Tosa
Mitsunobu's extensive and underappreciated body of artistic
achievements. The three scrolls that form the core of the study are
A Wakeful Sleep (Utatane soshi emaki), which recounts the
miraculous union of a man and a woman who had previously
encountered each other only in their dreams; The Jizo Hall (Jizodo
soshi emaki), which tells the story of a wayward monk who achieves
enlightenment with the help of a dragon princess; and Breaking the
Inkstone (Suzuriwari soshi emaki), which narrates the sacrifice of
a young boy for his household servant and its tragic consequences.
These three works are easily among the most artistically
accomplished and sophisticated small scrolls to have survived.
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Nadine Gordimer
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R398
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