Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture

This book explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers – Yosa Buson (1716–83), Ema Saikō (1787–1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) – experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati ( bunjin ) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of lyric expression in literati culture and advanced the emergence of modern prose poetr