Optical Allusions - Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (Ca. 800-1200)

In Optical Allusions: Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (ca. 800-1200), Joseph T. Sorensen illustrates how, on both the theoretical and the practical level, painted screens and other visual art objects helped define some of the essential characteristics of Japanese court poetry. In his examination of the important genre later termed screen poetry, Sorensen employs ekphrasis (the literary description of a visual art object) as a framework to analyze poems composed on or for painted screens. He provides close readings of poems and their social, political, and cultural contexts to argue the importance of the visual arts in the formation of Japanese poetics and poetic conventions.

About the author

Joseph T. Sorensen, Ph.D. (2005) from the University of California at Berkeley, is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of California at Davis. His research centers on text-image relationships and, more recently, on the role of narrative fiction in the court poetry of late classical-early medieval Japan.

Product details

• Authors: Joseph T Sorensen, Joseph T. Sorensen
• Publisher: Koninklijke Brill NV
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.07.2012
• EAN: 9789004219311
• ISBN: 978-90-04-21931-1
• No. of pages: 306
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 244 mm x 25 mm
• Weight: 626 g
• Series: Brill's Japanese Studies Libra; Brill
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Art > Plastic arts