Aesthetic Life : Beauty and Art in Modern Japan / Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lippit, Miya Elise Mizuta, author.

Series:

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 400.

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 400

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Feminine beauty (Aesthetics)--Japan.

Feminine beauty (Aesthetics).

Feminine beauty (Aesthetics) in art.

Feminine beauty (Aesthetics) in literature.

Arts, Japanese--1868-.

Arts, Japanese.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

Leiden; Boston : BRILL, 2019.

Other Title:

Beauty and Art in Modern Japan

Place of Publication:

Boston : Harvard University Asia Center, 2019.

Summary:

This study of modern Japan engages the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the "beautiful woman" (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868-1912). With origins in the formative period of modern Japanese art and aesthetics, the figure of the bijin appeared across a broad range of visual and textual media: photographs, illustrations, prints, and literary works, as well as fictional, critical, and journalistic writing. It eventually constituted a genre of painting called bijinga (paintings of beauties). Aesthetic Life examines the contributions of writers, artists, scholars, critics, journalists, and politicians to the discussion of the bijin and to the production of a national discourse on standards of Japanese beauty and art. As Japan worked to establish its place in the world, it actively presented itself as an artistic nation based on these ideals of feminine beauty. The book explores this exemplary figure for modern Japanese aesthetics and analyzes how the deceptively ordinary image of the beautiful Japanese woman--an iconic image that persists to this day--was cultivated as a "national treasure," synonymous with Japanese culture.

Contents:

All too aesthetically: the Bijin in the era of Japonisme

"Fair Japan": art, war, and the Bijin at the Saint Louis World's Fair, 1904

True Bijin: the debate on truth and beauty

Bijin graphic: illustrated magazines and the popular ideology of beauty

"Short-lived beauty": illustration and the bijin heroines of literary realism

Living works of art: Soseki's aesthetic heroines

Bijinga: the Nihonga genre and the fashioning of material beauty.

Notes:

Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.--Yale University, 2001) issued under the title: Figures of beauty : aesthetics and the beautiful woman in Meiji Japan.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-300) and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781684175758

1684175755

OCLC:

1127310595

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9781684175758 DOI