Excursions in identity : travel and the intersection of place, gender, and status in Edo Japan / Laura Nenzi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nenzi, Laura.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Travelers' writings, Japanese--History and criticism.

Travelers' writings, Japanese.

Japan--Description and travel.

Japan.

Japan--Social conditions--1600-1868.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (274 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the Edo period (1600-1868), status- and gender-based expectations largely defined a person's place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to celebrate their profession as belle-lettrists. For women in particular the open road and the blank page of the diary offered a precious opportunity to create personal hierarchies defined less by gender and more by culture and refinement. After the mid-eighteenth century-which saw the popularization of culture and the rise of commercial printing-textbooks, guides, comical fiction, and woodblock prints allowed not a few commoners to acquaint themselves with the historical, lyrical, or artistic pedigree of Japan's famous sites. By identifying themselves with famous literary and historical icons of the past, some among these erudite commoners saw an opportunity to rewrite their lives and re-create their identities in the pages of their travel diaries. The chapters in Part One, "Re-creating Spaces," introduce the notion that the spaces of travel were malleable, accommodating reconceptualization across interpretive frames. Laura Nenzi shows that, far from being static backgrounds, these travelscapes proliferated in a myriad of loci where one person's center was another's periphery. In Part Two, "Re-creating Identities," we see how, in the course of the Edo period, educated persons used travel to, or through, revered lyrical sites to assert and enhance their roles and identities. Finally, in Part Three, "Purchasing Re-creation," Nenzi looks at the intersection between recreational travel and the rising commercial economy, which allowed visitors to appropriate landscapes through new means: monetary transactions, acquisition of tangible icons, or other forms of physical interaction.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Everything Flows

Part I: Re -creating Spaces

Chapter 1 .Maps, Movements, and the Malleable Spaces of Edo Japan

Chapter 2. At the Intersection of Travel and Gender

Part II: Re-creating Identities

Chapter 3. Women on the Road: Identities in Motion

Chapter 4. Palimpsests: The Open Road and the Blank Page

Part III: Purchasing Re-creation

Chapter 5. Print Matters: Popularizing Past and Present

Chapter 6. Icons of Escapism

Chapter 7. Bodies, Brothels, and Baths: Travel and Physical Re-creation

Conclusion Dreaming of Walking near Fuji

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Aug 2019)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [231]-248) and index.

ISBN:

9780824869199

0824869192

9780824862435

0824862430

9781441656933

1441656936

OCLC:

646066550