A01=Timon Screech
aesthetics
art history
arts
Author_Timon Screech
boundaries
Category=AFC
Category=AFH
Category=AGHX
class structures
cultures
edo period
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
erotic images
erotica
eroticism
fantasy
gender
historical studies
human body
illustrations
imagery
japan
japanese culture
lovers
men
paintings
physical bodies
picture of spring
porn
pornographic image
pornography
prints
regimes
sex
sexuality
shunga
social habits
symbols
ukiyo-e movement
women
woodblock print format
Product details
- ISBN 9781861894328
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Feb 2009
- Publisher: Reaktion Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Newly revised and expanded, this second edition of Timon Screech’s definitive Sex and the Floating World offers a real assessment of the genre of Japanese paintings and prints today known as shunga. Changes in Japanese law in the 1990s enabled erotic images to be published without fear of prosecution, and many shunga picture-books have since appeared. There has, however, been very little attempt to situate the imagery within the contexts of sexuality, gender or power. Questions of aesthetics, and of whether shunga deserve a place in the official history of Japanese art, have dominated, and the question of the use of these images has been avoided. Timon Screech seeks to re-establish shunga in a proper historical frame of culture and creativity.
Shunga prints are not like any other form of picture for the simple fact that they are overtly about sex. And once we begin to examine them first and foremost as sexual apparatus, then we must be prepared for some surprises.
The author opens up for us the strange world of sexual fantasy in the Edo culture of eighteenth-century Japan, and investigates the tensions in class and gender of those that made - and made use of - shunga.
Timon Screech is Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of many books, including Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820 (2nd edn, Reaktion, 2009).
