Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women's Memoirs

by Edith Sarra

The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the "middle ranks" whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities-erotic, political, and literary-of real and metaphorical...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804733783
• ISBN13: 9780804733786
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.3"