Kendra Strand: An Unfamiliar Place, Gebunden

Klappentext

"In the mid-fourteenth century, when Japan's imperial succession practices had been strained by decades of civil unrest, three men embarked on journeys that would lead them to reimagine their world: The second Ashikaga shogun Yoshiakira (1330-1367) went to Sumiyoshi to pray for poetic skill; Priest Såokyåu (ca. 1350) wandered for three years of pleasure and ascetic practice; and aristocratic statesman Nijåo Yoshimoto (1320-1388) fled his home in Kyoto to solicit military support. Each encountered unfamiliar territory and unprecedented situations; each of their diaries represents landscapes from perspectives of erasure and absence. This manuscript examines how these powerful figures used literal and metaphorical "unfamiliar places" as sites to reassess their inherited worldview, to reconstruct their imagined geography by gathering information about the places they visited, and to explore novel ways of representing those places as landscapes. Considering the volatile moment in history, when physical violence was a perpetual threat if not a continual reality, the question for these writers became one of how to imagine and construct history through the landscape in a way that would shape the poetic canon and influence views on imperial power, even if it necessitated the destruction of long held conventions of classical poetic practice"--