Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Books

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  Unruly Cradle: Poetic Responses to the March 11, 2011 Disasters

  Jeffrey Angles

  Collection of poetry remembering the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 and the subsequent nuclear disaster. Features poems by panelists at a symposium held March 11, 2016 at Josai University's International Modern Poetry Center: Arai Takako, Ōsaki Sayaka, Shiraishi Kazuko, Takano Mutsuo, Takahashi Mutsuo, Tanaka Yōsuke, Tanikawa Shuntarō, Hirata Toshiko, Tian Yuan, Mizuta Noriko, and Jeffrey Angles. English translations by Jeffrey Angles.

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  The Book of the Dead

  Jeffrey Angles

  First published in 1939 and extensively revised in 1943, The Book of the Dead, loosely inspired by the tale of Isis and Osiris from ancient Egypt, is a sweeping historical romance that tells a gothic tale of love between a noblewoman and a ghost in eighth-century Japan. Its author, Orikuchi Shinobu, was a well-received novelist, distinguished poet, and an esteemed scholar. He is often considered one of the fathers of Japanese folklore studies, and The Book of the Dead is without a doubt the most important novel of Orikuchi’s career—and it is a book like no other.

  Here, for the first time, is the complete English translation of Orikuchi’s masterwork, whose vast influence is evidenced by multiple critical studies dedicated to it and by its many adaptations, which include an animated film and a popular manga. This translation features an introduction by award-winning translator Jeffrey Angles discussing the historical background of the work as well as its major themes: the ancient origins of the Japanese nation, the development of religion in a modernizing society, and the devotion necessary to create a masterpiece. Also included are three chapters from The Mandala of Light by Japanese intellectual historian Ando Reiji, who places the novel and Orikuchi’s thought in the broader intellectual context of early twentieth-century Japan.

  The Book of the Dead focuses on the power of faith and religious devotion, and can be read as a parable illustrating the suffering an artist must experience to create great art. Readers will soon discover that a great deal lies hidden beneath the surface of the story; the entire text is a modernist mystery waiting to be decoded.

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  These Things Here and Now

  Jeffrey Angles

  In a time that for many of us in Tokyo and beyond feels far removed from the events of March 11, 2011, when we are not sure how to retain and respect those moments and their aftermath, this collection does exactly that.

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  Time Differences

  Jeffrey Angles

  Short story translated into English from Yōko Tawada's collection of short stories: "Umi ni otoshita namae"; first published: Tōkyō : Shinchōsha, 2006.

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  Los cautivos de Argel

  Natalio Ohanna

  Esta edición de Los cautivos de Argel cumple el deber de reivindicar una valiosa obra del Siglo de Oro y ponerla al alcance de la comunidad académica y el público general en forma fiable. Su publicación en Clásicos Castalia viene a suplir un vacío en la historia editorial de esta pieza que bien merece ingresar en el canon de nuestras letras. Se trata de una fuente esencial para entender la literatura de cautiverio en su modalidad de espectáculo, así como la representación de las relaciones entre cristianos y musulmanes en un período de la vida de España marcado por la coyuntura de la lucha contra el islam, la guerra del corso en el Mediterráneo, la persecución de las minorías religiosas y la construcción de una embrionaria identidad nacional sobre la base de unos mitos de origen que la obra pone de relieve y explota. También suscita interés por el aliciente añadido de cuanto le debe a la primera comedia de Miguel de Cervantes, escrita a finales de 1580, al regreso del cautiverio en Argel. Numerosas notas de esta edición procuran dilucidar ese asunto al que no se le resta importancia, porque se trata, en definitiva, del más prolongado diálogo intertextual entre las dos figuras más universales de las letras áureas.

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  Historical Dictionary of Medieval China

  Victor Cunrui Xiong

  The crucial period of Chinese history, 168-979, falls naturally into contrasting phases. The first phase, also known as that of 'early medieval China,' is an age of political decentralization. Following the breakup of the Han empire, China was plunged into civil war and fragmentation and stayed divided for nearly four centuries. The second phase started in 589, during the Sui dynasty, when China was once again brought under a single government. Under the Sui, the bureaucracy was revitalized, the military strengthened, and the taxation system reformed. The fall of the Sui in 618 gave way to the even stronger Tang dynasty, which represents an apogee of traditional Chinese civilization. Inheriting all the great institutions developed under the Sui, the Tang made great achievements in poetry, painting, music, and architecture. The An Lushan rebellion, which also took place during Tang rule, brought about far-reaching changes in the socioeconomic, political, and military arenas. What transpired in the second half of the Tang and the ensuing Five Dynasties provided the foundation for the next age of late imperial China.

  This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Medieval China contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on historical figure. It expands on existing thematic entries, and adds a number of new ones with substantial content, including those on nobility, art, architecture, archaeology, economy, agriculture, money, population, cities, literature, historiography, military, religion, Persia, India, Japan, Korea, Arabs, and Byzantium, among others. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about medieval China.

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  わたしの日付変更線 (My International Date Line)

  Jeffrey Angles

  Poems by Jeffrey Angles

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  Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Dom Edmond Obrecht Collection of Gethsemani Abbey

  Susan M B Steuer and E. Rozanne Elder

  Catalogue of the Obrecht Collection owned by Gethsemani Abbey

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  Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World

  Anise K. Strong

  Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World is the first substantial account of elite Roman concubines and courtesans. Exploring the blurred line between proper matron and wicked prostitute, it illuminates the lives of sexually promiscuous women like Messalina and Clodia, as well as prostitutes with hearts of gold who saved Rome and their lovers in times of crisis. It also offers insights into the multiple functions of erotic imagery and the circumstances in which prostitutes could play prominent roles in Roman public and religious life. Tracing the evolution of social stereotypes and concepts of virtue and vice in ancient Rome, this volume reveals the range of life choices and sexual activity, beyond the traditional binary depiction of wives or prostitutes, that were available to Roman women.

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  Gunpowder Percy

  Grace Tiffany

  “What are the three parts of powder? Anger. Nostalgia. Love.” These are what drive Thomas Percy, a Catholic Englishman chafing under the rule of the Scotsman James I in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Percy’s passions, fueled by an obsession with the medieval-history plays staged at Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse, erupt at last in a wild plan to save the soul of a kingdom – by killing its Protestant king.

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  Poems of Hiromi Ito, Toshiko Hirata & Takako Arai

  Ito Hiromi Toshiki Hirata, Takako Arari, and Jeffrey Angles

  This collection brings together the work of three of Japan's most creative, innovative, and challenging contemporary poets. During the 1980s, Itō and Hirata quickly emerged as major new poetic voices, breaking taboos and writing about sexual desire, marital strife, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in such direct and powerful ways that they sent shockwaves through the literary establishment. In recent years, Arai has emerged as a leader of the next generation of poets, writing about working-class women and their fates within the world of global capital. All three poets have rejected the stayed, polished language that dominates poetic discourse and instead have favored dramatic voices that are raw, powerful, and frequently quite dark. Socially engaged and poetically aware, these three are poised to become some of the most important poetic voices of the twenty-first century.

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  Capital Cities and Urban Form in Pre-modern China: Luoyang, 1038 BCE to 938 CE (Asian States and Empires)

  Victor Cunrui Xiong

  Luoyang, situated in present-day Henan province, was one of the great urban centres of pre-Qin and early imperial China, the favoured site for dynastic capitals for almost two millennia. This book, the first in any Western language on the subject, traces the rise and fall of the six different capital cities in the region which served eleven different dynasties from the Western Zhou dynasty, when the first capital city made its appearance in Luoyang, to the great Tang dynasty, when Luoyang experienced a golden age. It examines the political histories of these cities, explores continuity and change in urban form with a particular focus on city layouts and landmark buildings, and discusses the roles of religions, especially Buddhism, and illustrious city residents. Overall the book provides an accessible survey of a broad sweep of premodern Chinese urban history.

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  Wild Grass on the Riverbank

  Hiromi Ito and Jeffrey Angles

  Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles. Set simultaneously in the California desert and her native Japan, tracking migrant children who may or may not be human, or alive, Hiromi Itō's WILD GRASS ON THE RIVERBANK will plunge you into dreamlike landscapes of volatile proliferation: shape-shifting mothers, living father-corpses, and pervasively odd vegetation. At once grotesque and vertiginous, Itō interweaves mythologies, language, sexuality, and place into a genre-busting narrative of what it is to be a migrant.

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  Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro: African Storytellers of the Karamoja Plateau and the Plains of Turkana

  Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler

  The Jie people of northern Uganda and the Turkana of northern Kenya have a genesis myth about Nayeche, a Jie woman who followed the footprints of a gray bull across the waterless plateau and who founded a "cradle land" in the plains of Turkana. In Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro, Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler shows how the poetic journey of Nayeche and the gray bull Engiro and their metaphorical return during the Jie harvest rituals gives rise to stories, imagery, and the articulation of ethnic and individual identities.

  Since the 1990s, Mirzeler has travelled to East Africa to apprentice with storytellers. Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro is both an account of his experience listening to these storytellers and of how oral tradition continues to evolve in the modern world. Mirzeler's work contributes significantly to the anthropology of storytelling, the study of myth and memory, and the use of oral tradition in historical studies.

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  Between Lipany and White Mountain: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bohemian History in Modern Czech Scholarship

  James Palmitessa

  This book presents twelve essays by Czech historians on the history of the Czech lands from the middle of the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, previously published in Czech, which appear here for the first time in English.

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  Heavenly Khan

  Victor Cunrui Xiong

  This historical fiction is based on the true story of Li Shimin (also known as Tang Taizong), the greatest sovereign in Chinese history. About 30 years younger than Muhammad, he grew up in a world of devastating upheaval that tore China asunder and was thrust into the role of a military commander in his father’s rebel army while still a teenager. In the process of vanquishing his enemies on the battlefield, he proved himself to be a great military genius. As emperor he encouraged critical suggestions by his court officials, which he often adopted, and lent support to the religions of his day, notably, Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity. The international prestige he had won for Tang China was so high that the states of Central and North Asia honored him with the title of “Heavenly Khan.” Although his father founded the dynasty, it was his reign that laid the groundwork for a brilliant empire that was to endure for centuries.

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  Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew

  Margaret Dupuis and Grace Tiffany

  The impetus for this Approaches to Teaching volume on The Taming of the Shrew grew from the editors' desire to discover why a play notorious for its controversial exploration of conflicts between men and women and the challenges of marriage is enduringly popular in the classroom, in the performing arts, and in scholarship. The result is a volume that offers practical advice to teachers on editions and teaching resources in part 1, "Materials," while illuminating how the play's subtle and complex arguments regarding not just marriage but a host of other subjects--modes of early modern education, the uses of clever rhetoric, intergenerational and class politics, the power of theater--are being brought to life in college classrooms. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," are written by English and theater instructors who have taught in a variety of academic settings and cover topics including early modern homilies and music, Hollywood versions of The Taming of the Shrew, and student performances.

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  Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End

  Tamaki Saito and Jeffrey Angles

  This is the first English translation by Jeffrey Angles of a controversial Japanese best seller that made the public aware of the social problem ofhikikomori, or “withdrawal”—a phenomenon estimated by the author to involve as many as one million Japanese adolescents and young adults who have withdrawn from society, retreating to their rooms for months or years and severing almost all ties to the outside world. Saitō Tamaki’s work of popular psychology provoked a national debate about the causes and extent of the condition.

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  Paint

  Grace Tiffany

  Emilia Bassano is only a teenager when she's pitched among the poets, politicians, and painted women of the Elizabethan court. Withdrawn and pensive by nature, she devises a remarkable strategy to preserve her own solitude. At first it works. But she's soon shocked to find that, so far from truly hiding, she's attracted the gaze of every courtier and aspiring poet on the scene, including the canniest, hungriest, and strangest one of them all.

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  Twelve Views from the Distance

  Jeffrey Angles and Mutsuo Takahashi

  From one of the foremost poets in contemporary Japan comes this entrancing memoir that traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Originally published in 1970, this translation is the first available in English.

  In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, Twelve Views from the Distancepresents a vanished time and place through the eyes of an accomplished poet. Recounting memories from his youth, Mutsuo Takahashi captures the full range of his internal life as a boy, shifting between his experiences and descriptions of childhood friendships, games, songs, and school. With great candor, he also discusses the budding awareness of his sexual preference for men, providing a rich exploration of one man’s early queer life in a place where modern, Western-influenced models of gay identity were still unknown.

  Growing up poor in rural southwestern Japan, far from the urban life that many of his contemporaries have written about, Takahashi experienced a reality rarely portrayed in literature. In addition to his personal remembrances, the book paints a vivid portrait of rural Japan, full of oral tradition, superstition, and remnants of customs that have quickly disappeared in postwar Japan. With profuse local color and detail, he re-creates the lost world that was the setting for his beginnings as a gay man and poet.

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  Writing the Love of Boys : Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature

  Jeffrey Angles

  Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, around the end of the century Japanese culture began to portray same-sex desire as immoral. "Writing the Love of Boys" looks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological. Jeffrey Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shiro, the anthropologist Iwata Junichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho. "Writing the Love of Boys" shows how these authors interjected the subject of male-male desire into discussions of modern art, aesthetics, and perversity. It also explores the impact of their efforts on contemporary Japanese culture, including the development of the tropes of male homoeroticism that recur so often in Japanese girls manga about bishonen love.

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  Cautiverio y convivencia en la edad de Cervantes

  Natalio Ohanna

  Cautiverio y convivencia en la edad de Cervantes [Captivity and Coexistence in the Age of Cervantes] explores Spanish narratives of coexistence in Muslim and Native American lands, through the lens of captivity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Far from engaging with the violence or trauma of confinement, the author studies the cognitive experience that results from abrupt immersion in a foreign culture, which leads to a revision of homogeneous and stereotypical perceptions of cultural, religious and ethnic differences, and ultimately undermines the perception of one’s own society as a stable world. In the Early Modern use of captivity narratives as critical instruments, Natalio Ohanna identifies a pluralistic conception that aims to transform the complex web of images, attitudes, beliefs, and practices with which the Spain of Cervantes dealt with the problem of difference between human groups.

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  Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako

  Jeffrey Angles

  One of Japan's most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930-2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada's writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women's inner lives make her very much a poet of the world.Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada's extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms oftanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.

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  箱字宙を讃えて : ジョゼフ・コーネル / Hako ji chū o tataete: Joseph Cornell

  Mutsuo Takahashi, Kawamura Kinen Bijutsukan, and Jeffrey Angles

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  Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō

  Jeffrey Angles and Hiromi Ito

  Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles. "I want to get rid of Kanoko/I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko/I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples." "KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in fine translation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, Hiromi Ito. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies and delights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures-fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats"-Anne Waldman.