1st Edition

Interdisciplinary Edo Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Modern Japan

Edited By Joshua Schlachet, William C. Hedberg Copyright 2024
276 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

276 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

276 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Interdisciplinary Edo brings together scholars from across the methodological spectrum to explore new approaches to innovative humanistic research on early modern Japan (1603–1868). It makes an intervention in the field by thinking across conventional disciplinary boundaries toward a holistic and cohesive approach to Japan’s early modern period. By taking historical, religious, literary, and... Read more

1.         Introduction: Doing Interdisciplinary Edo

 

            Joshua Schlachet and William C. Hedberg

 

 

Part I: Interconnected EdoGlobal Roots and Routes of Early Modern Japan

 

2.         The Buddhist World Map in Edo Print Culture:

Religious Vision in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

 

            D. Max Moerman

 

3.         What Was Dutch in Early Modern Japan?

 

            Claire E. Cooper

 

4.         Nonsense, Gibberish, and Scribble:

Playing with Foreign Languages and Re-Orienting Epistemic Regimes

 

Drisana Misra

 

5.         Ocean Influences: Managing Risk in Coastal Shipping

 

            Jakobina Arch

 

 

Part II: Objects and IdeasCrosscurrents in Material and Intellectual Culture

 

6.         The Environmental and Material Foundations of Kyoto

 

            Morgan Pitelka

 

7.         Seeing History: Warrior Images in Late Edo Popular Culture

 

            Hilary K. Snow

 

8.         Ninety-Nineteenth Bottles of Wine:

Objects, Affects, and Intoxication in Shikitei Sanba’s Namaei Katagi

 

Dylan McGee

 

 

Part III: Popular Culture and AestheticsHow Serious Was Play in Edo Japan?

 

9.         Poetry, Natural Wonders, and Changing Perception in Tokugawa Japan

 

            Nobuko Toyosawa

 

10.       New Bracken and Flying Hover Flies and the Expanding Universe of Painting in Late Eighteenth-Century Japan

 

            Chelsea Foxwell

 

11.       Against Popularization: Anti-Populist Currents in Edo-Period Literati Culture

           

            Yoshitaka Yamamoto

 

 

Part IV: Edo After Edo What is ‘Early Modern,’ ‘Japanese,’ and ‘Cultural’ About

Early Modern Japanese Culture?

 

12.       The Modern Discovery of Fūryū in Twentieth Century Japan

 

            Jingyi Li

 

13.       Histories of Periodization: Demarcations, Blurred Boundaries, and New Perspectives

 

            Christina Laffin

 

14.       Modern Predicaments and Forgotten Enlightenment:

Towards a Post-Post-Colonial Humanity (In Honor of Tetsuo Najita)

 

Katsuya Hirano, Translated by N.H. Wimpey

 

15.       The Always Already (But Maybe Not Quite) Pre-Postmodern Edo

 

            Christopher Smith

 

 

16.       Conclusion: Should Japanese Studies Be Disciplined?

 

            Joshua Schlachet and William C. Hedberg

 

Biography

Joshua Schlachet is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, where he teaches courses on Japanese history, dietary cultures, and everyday life. He is a historian of early modern Japan, specializing in the cultural history of food and nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His monograph in progress, Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan, examines the emergence of dietary common knowledge and its engagement with social hierarchy, economic productivity, and moral cultivation.

William C. Hedberg is an Associate Professor of Japanese literature at Arizona State University.  His primary focus is the Japanese reception of Chinese fiction and drama during the early modern period, and he is the author of The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon (2019).  His current research project focuses on the literature and culture of travel in Edo-period Japan, with special emphasis on Japanese perceptions of the Manchu conquest of the Ming.