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Envisioning the Empress illuminates dynamic and powerful empresses who impacted not only women in their own time, but whose influence extended to later generations of royalty, creating a greater role for imperial women and elevating the status of women's roles at a crucial juncture in Japanese history.
List of contents
Introduction: The Visual MonarchyPart IChapter One: The Modern Imperial Family: Institutions and Images
Chapter Two: Mimesis and Multiples: Empress Sh¿ken and the Power of Print in Establishing the Public Empress Persona
Chapter Three: The Optics of Modernity: Empress Teimei, Photography, Mass Media, and Gender in the Imperial Likeness
Part IIChapter Four: Toward the Sacred and the Standard: Formality, Lineage, and Decorum in the Modern Japanese Imperial Portrait
Chapter Five: Fashion, National Identity, and the Community of Royals: Global Monarchical Visual Culture Between the Meiji and Taish¿ Periods
Chapter Six: Mourning and Memory: The Visual Politics of Imperial Funerals and Memorial Sites
ConclusionAppendixBibliography
About the author
Alison J. Miller is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of the South (Sewanee). Her scholarship focuses on images of women across visual media in modern Japan. She is co-editor of
The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity (2021) and
Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia (2024).
Summary
Envisioning the Empress illuminates dynamic and powerful empresses who impacted not only women in their own time, but whose influence extended to later generations of royalty, creating a greater role for imperial women and elevating the status of women’s roles at a crucial juncture in Japanese history.
