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  • Cited by 2
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2003
Online ISBN:
9780511811715

Book description

Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, written in Japan in the early eleventh century, is acknowledged to be one of Japan's greatest literary achievements, and sometimes thought of as the world's first novel. It is also one of the earliest major works to be written by a woman. This introduction to the Genji sketches the cultural background, offers detailed analysis of the text, discusses matters of language and style and ends by tracing the history of its reception through nine centuries of cultural change. This book will be useful for survey courses in Japanese and World Literature. Because The Tale of Genji is so long, it is often not possible for students to read it in its entirety and this book will therefore be used not only as an introduction, but also as a guide through the difficult and convoluted plot.

Reviews

‘… an erudite commentary encouraging the reader to investigate one of the most important Japanese texts by exploring a plethora of ideas in a guided but open manner.‘

Source: Forum for Modern Language Studies

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Contents

Guide to further reading
Bibliography
Bibliography
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Bargen, D. 1997. A Woman's Weapon: Spirit Possession in ‘The Tale of Genji’ (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press)
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Gatten, A. P. 1977b. ‘The secluded forest: textual problems in the Genji monogatari’, Ph.D dissertation, University of Michigan
Gatten, A. P. 1981. ‘The order of the early chapters in the Genji monogatari’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41 (1): 5–46
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