The Bridge of Dreams
A Poetics of 'The Tale of Genji
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2911175 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert Lyons Danly (University of Michigan, corresponding author), Haruo Shirane (0000-0001-5996-9981) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 532 |
| Publication date | 1988-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Pacific Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0030-851X • E-ISSN: 1715-3379 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2760493 |
| OpenAlex | W2025150877 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
The Bridge of Dreams is a brilliant reading of The Tale of Genji that succeeds both as a sophisticated work of literary criticism and as an introduction this world masterpiece. Taking account of current literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly baffling work. The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments, sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji and the manner in which recurrent concerns--political, social, and religious--are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the work evolves from one stage to another. Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the Genji works both within and against the larger literary and sociopolitical tradition. The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual problems and a detailed index of principal characters
Art · Bridge (graph theory) · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · History · Japanese History and Culture · Medicine
Poetic Deception
Narrative Cultures in the Mirror
Echoes of the Past
Functions of Millenarism in Premodern Japanese Literature
Symbolic Death and Rebirth into Womanhood
O cinema de Naomi Kawase e o corpo como matéria fílmica
The interlingual translation between premodern China and Japan
Tra corte, casa e monastero La vita di una donna nel Giappone del Medioevo
The Disaster of the Third Princess
When Caged Birds Sing
I Am I
Noh Drama and The Tale of Genji
Waking the Dead
Love, Poetry and Renunciation
Writing the irogonomi
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,44 |
| Citation span | 1992 - 2022 (31) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |