Writing Violence

Reviews / Votes

Radically transforms understanding of 17th- and 18th-century commercial fiction in Japan . . . Atherton's analyses are readable, detailed, and extensive. This book is a significant accomplishment. * Choice Reviews * Lucid, eloquent, nuanced, and deeply grounded, Writing Violence offers a new vision of what it meant to be "creative" in early modern Japan and new tools for teasing out the politics of early modern narrative works. It's hard to overstate what a revelation this book is. -- Michael Emmerich, author of <i>The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature</i> Writing Violence is a deeply thoughtful and insightful rumination on early modern Japanese literature in its sociohistorical contexts. By addressing issues of cultural, political, and literary form in selected works from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Atherton suggests brilliant new ways of reading and understanding the popular fiction of the age. -- Keller Kimbrough, author of <i>Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way: Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Japan</i> Freeing early modern revenge and disaster stories from readings of political praise or subversion, Atherton's bold and theoretically innovative study argues that their form was not formulaic, but an incubator of new perceptual possibilities. In prose that delights and surprises, Atherton shows that Edo authors re-signified violence, remade form, and rethought the power of fiction. -- Vyjayanthi R. Selinger, author of <i>Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Symbolism in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order</i> This beautifully written book offers a fresh perspective on the literary politics of the Edo period. While it focuses on accounts of violence-fires and fights, theft and murder-it is also a lively and humorous introduction to the joys of early modern literature. -- Amy Stanley, author of <i>Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World</i> With its rich close readings, Writing Violence clearly shows the importance of modular construction and "form" to the literature of early modern Japan and provides us with new ways of thinking about the relationship between a text and the outside world. -- Matthew Fraleigh, author of <i>Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryuhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan</i> A revelatory work, one that will surely become a milestone in the study of early modern Japanese literature. It is very readable, with an arresting blend of elegant description and sharp analysis that will appeal to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike. * Monumenta Nipponica *