Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan
by Grace E. Lavery
- New
- Hardcover
- Condition
- New/New
- ISBN 10
- 0691183627
- ISBN 13
- 9780691183626
- Seller
-
Des Moines, Iowa, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Princeton University Press, 2019. Hardcover. New/New. New tightly bound hardcover with like DJ. 8vo. Text is clean and free of marks or underlining. Includes author's notes, index, and B&W photography and illustrations throughout. 219 pp.
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How Japan captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western aesthetics
From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. Quaint, Exquisite explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, textual criticism, and a wealth of in-depth archival research, Grace Lavery provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the "subjective universal" condition of aesthetic judgment. The book features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats's prized katana sword and the "Japanese vellum" luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. Quaint, Exquisite provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino. .Reviews
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Details
- Bookseller
- The Anthropologists Closet (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 2245
- Title
- Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan
- Author
- Grace E. Lavery
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- New
- Jacket Condition
- New
- Quantity Available
- 1
- ISBN 10
- 0691183627
- ISBN 13
- 9780691183626
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Date Published
- 2019
- Keywords
- Japan, Victorian, Aesthetics, Western aesthetics, Beauty, Globalization, Art,
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About the Seller
The Anthropologists Closet
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Des Moines, Iowa
About The Anthropologists Closet
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