For students, fans, and scholars alike, this wide-ranging primer on anime employs a panoply of critical approaches Well-known through hit movies like Spirited Away, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, anime has a long history spanning a wide range of directors, genres, and styles. Christopher Bolton's Interpreting Anime is a thoughtful, carefully organized introduction to Japanese animation for anyone eager to see why this genre has remained a vital, adaptable art form for decades. Interpreting Anime is easily accessible and structured around individual films and a broad array of critical approaches. Each chapter centers on a different feature-length anime film, juxtaposing it with a particular medium-like literary fiction, classical Japanese theater, and contemporary stage drama-to reveal what is unique about anime's way of representing the world. This analysis is abetted by a suite of questions provoked by each film, along with Bolton's incisive responses. Throughout, Interpreting Anime applies multiple frames, such as queer theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of postmodernism, giving readers a thorough understanding of both the cultural underpinnings and critical significance of each film. What emerges from the sweep of Interpreting Anime is Bolton's original, articulate case for what makes anime unique as a medium: how it at once engages profound social and political realities while also drawing attention to the very challenges of representing reality in animation's imaginative and compelling visual forms.

Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (1924 1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of avant-garde literature. From his early forays into science fiction to his more mature psychological novels and films, and finally the complicated experimental works produced near the end of his career, Abe weaves together a range of voices: the styles of science and the language of literary forms.

In Abe s oeuvre, this stylistic interplay links questions of language and subjectivity with issues of national identity and technological development in a way that ultimately aspires to become the catalyst for an artistic revolution. While recognizing the disruptions such a revolution might entail, Abe s texts embrace these disjunctions as a way of realizing radical new possibilities beyond everyday experience and everyday values.

By arguing that the crisis of identity and postwar anomie in Abe s works is inseparable from the need to marshal these different scientific and literary voices, Christopher Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves a search for identity that must take place at the level of the self and society at large.

Since the end of the Second World WarOCoand particularly over the last decadeOCoJapanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visualOCofrom Gojira" (Godzilla)" and Astro Boy" in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira" and Ghost in the Shell" of the 1980s and 1990sOCowhile little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan.

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Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams" remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Bringing together Western scholars and leading Japanese critics, this groundbreaking work traces the beginnings, evolution, and future direction of science fiction in Japan, its major schools and authors, cultural origins and relationship to its Western counterparts, the role of the genre in the formation of JapanOCOs national and political identity, and its unique fan culture.

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Covering a remarkable range of textsOCofrom the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kysaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy"OCothis book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction "as a vital and exciting genre.

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Contributors: Hiroki Azuma; Hiroko Chiba, DePauw U; Naoki Chiba; William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College; Mari Kotani; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Stanford U; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Tamaki Sait; Thomas Schnellbncher, Berlin Free U.

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Christopher Bolton is assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College.

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Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. is professor of English at DePauw University.

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Takayuki Tatsumi is professor of English at Keio University."