Turning Japanese: Japonisme in Victorian Literature and Culture.

Japonisme;Victorian culture;Material Culture;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

McAdams, Elizabeth SaraPrins, Yopie ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Japonisme;    Victorian culture;    Material Culture;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/120762/emcadams_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

When Matthew Perry opened Japan to foreign trade in 1854 after more than two centuries of official isolation, Japan became an immediate locus of extraordinary curiosity and fascination for the West. How Japan would thereafter be understood, negotiated, and imagined became an important part of mid-to-late Victorian consciousness. While Japanese influence has been examined piecemeal in disparate disciplines, the unification of this topic as a larger, interdisciplinary, multimodal discourse is still a necessary step for a better understanding. This study of Japonisme as a discourse brings into sharp relief how transnational encounters produce a moment of paradox in which the other nation must be unlearned and simultaneously imaginatively peopled. This process is alluded to in Oscar Wilde’s declaration that, ;;The whole of Japan is pure invention. There is no such place, no such people.” I differ with Wilde: I say that both the pure invention and the tangible reality are important parts of the transnational encounter. Japan’s relations with Western nations are always in part dictated by commodity exchanges. Japonisme merchandise was far from a simple ambassador of Japanese culture. The proliferation of Japonisme merchandise created a cultural disparity between male professionals of taste and female consumers of the products. In literary incarnations of Japonisme, Japanese merchandise is often placed between public and domestic spheres, caught between masculine and feminine influences, as I demonstrate in my first chapter. Once Japan had been ;;opened,” however, travel narratives began to trickle back to England. Japan had unusual popularity with female travel writers producing bestsellers and male scholars who inveighed against the quantity of competitor texts; again re-enacting the Japonisme’s position as the fulcrum between public and private, male and female. These informative texts, the focus of the second chapter, eventually were out-sold and out-numbered by the popular Japonisme novels that I examine in my third chapter. These novels bring the interlocking issues of masculinity and femininity back to a Japan of ;;pure invention.” The generic norms of the Japonisme novels, delineated in my final chapter, create a literary space in which to debate Wilde’s hypothesis, that Japonisme erases Japan’s reality.