×


 x 

Shopping cart
Susan L Burns - Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan - 9780822331728 - V9780822331728
Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.

Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan

€ 47.43
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan Paperback. Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku (which means "the study of our country"), this title considers how three of the more marginalized participants in the movement challenged its principal founder and engaged its fundamental concerns about what defines the Japanese nation and unifies those within it. Series: Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Num Pages: 296 pages. BIC Classification: 1FPJ; JFC; JPFN. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 5969 x 3887 x 19. Weight in Grams: 408.
Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity.

Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2003
Publisher
Duke University Press United States
Number of pages
296
Condition
New
Series
Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society
Number of Pages
296
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
ISBN
9780822331728
SKU
V9780822331728
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Susan L Burns
Susan L. Burns is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

Reviews for Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan
“Before the Nation is a significant addition to the field of Japanese intellectual history and a very fine book.”—Leslie Pincus, author of Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics “In Before the Nation Susan L. Burns offers rock-solid research on a crucial topic in the intellectual history of state-formation and nationalism in Japan.”—J. Victor Koschmann, author of Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan

Goodreads reviews for Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan


Subscribe to our newsletter

News on special offers, signed editions & more!