Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature,

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Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and mediaâ€•from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery.

Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing.

Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.
Country USA
Brand Columbia University Press
Manufacturer Columbia University Press
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber Illustrated
UnitCount 1
Format Illustrated
UPCs 884645889776
EANs 9780231152815
ReleaseDate 2013-02-12

Country	USA
Brand	Columbia University Press
Manufacturer	Columbia University Press
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	Illustrated
UnitCount	1
Format	Illustrated
UPCs	884645889776
EANs	9780231152815
ReleaseDate	2013-02-12

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

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