Picturing the Floating World : Ukiyo-e in Context / Julie Nelson Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davis, Julie Nelson, Author.

Contributor:

De Gruyter.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Illustration of books--Japan--Edo period, 1600-1868.

Illustration of books.

Ukiyoe--History.

Ukiyoe.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (232 pages) : 80 color illlustrations

Contained In:

De Gruyter University Press Library.

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, [2021]

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

text file PDF

Summary:

Today we think of ukiyo-e-"the pictures of the floating world"-as masterpieces of Japanese art, highly prized throughout the world. Yet it is often said that ukiyo-e were little appreciated in their own time and were even used as packing material for ceramics. In Picturing the Floating World, Julie Nelson Davis debunks this myth and demonstrates that ukiyo-e was thoroughly appreciated as a field of artistic production, worthy of connoisseurship and canonization by its contemporaries. Putting these images back into their dynamic context, she shows how consumers, critics, and makers produced and sold, appraised and collected, and described and recorded ukiyo-e. She recovers this multilayered world of pictures in which some were made for a commercial market, backed by savvy entrepreneurs looking for new ways to make a profit, while others were produced for private coteries and high-ranking connoisseurs seeking to enrich their cultural capital. The book opens with an analysis of period documents to establish the terms of appraisal brought to ukiyo-e in late eighteenth-century Japan, mapping the evolution of the genre from a century earlier and the development of its typologies and the creation of a canon of makers-both of which have defined the field ever since. Organized around divisions of major technological and aesthetic developments, the book reveals how artistic practice and commercial enterprise were intertwined throughout ukiyo-e's history, from its earliest imagery through the twentieth century. The depiction of particular subjects in and for the floating world of urban Edo and the process of negotiating this within the larger field of publishing are examined to further ground ukiyo-e as material culture, as commodities in a mercantile economy.Picturing the Floating World offers a new approach: a critical yet accessible analysis of the genre as it was developed in its social, cultural, and political milieu. The book introduces students, collectors, and enthusiasts to ukiyo-e as a genre under construction in its own time while contributing to our understanding of early modern visual production.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: Inventing the Pictures of the Floating World

Chapter 2: Creating the Brocade Pictures of the East

Chapter 3: Making Famous Names

Chapter 4: Expanding Horizons

Epilogue: Evoking the Floating World

NOTES

WORKS CITED

GLOSSARY-INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2022)

ISBN:

9780824889333

OCLC:

1291507288

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.