Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan

Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyoshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction widely read in late-18th Century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced and consumed with three annotated translations of works by major author-artist, Santo Kyoden (1761-1816) that closely reproduce the experience of encountering the originals, Adam Kern offers a sustained close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. The kibyoshi, Kern argues, became an influential form of political satire that seemed poised to transform the uniquely Edoesque brand of urban commoner culture into something more, perhaps even a national culture, until the shogunal government intervened.

• Author
• Adam L. Kern

• Format
• hardcover

• Pages
• 256

• Publisher
• Harvard University Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780674022669

• Genres
• japan, history, art

• Release date
• 2007