Kabuki's Nineteenth Century Stage and Print in Early Modern Edo

Kabuki's Nineteenth Century examines the theater culture of nineteenth-century Japan from the perspective of the history and materiality of the book, the nature of reception, and the making and making use of images. The aim of this book is to rediscover the kabuki theater of nineteenth-century Japan by shifting our critical focus from performance to print and the public sphere, and thus embedding theater history within the larger world of printed matter by means of which theatricality circulated beyond the stage and through which performance was most often consumed.

Fundamental to Kabuki's Nineteenth Century is a reconsideration of the nature of the printed archive itself. The book argues that the archive of printed material related to the theater in nineteenth-century Japan (playbills, actor critiques, theater guides, maps, actor prints, calendars, and broadsheets) is something more than--and more complicated than--a set of materials out of which we might reconstitute the always transient event of performance. Rather, the archive constitutes an object of inquiry unto itself, an object that reveals as much about the interrelations between and among various printed media and genres circulating beyond the confines of the theater as it does about what happened on stage. Even as we use these materials to examine the history of performance, a series of different questions might be asked: what can the production, consumption, and collecting of this enormous body of printed matter tell us about such problems as the role of print in everyday life, the construction of specialized knowledges, and the manner in which a culture archives itself?

Jonathan Zwicker, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, University of California, Berkeley

Jonathan Zwicker is Associate Professor and Agassiz Chair in Japanese Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Before moving to U. C. Berkeley in 2016, he taught at the University of Michigan from 2005-2016 and was a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows from 2002-05. He is also a member of the International Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Japanese Literature.

Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
A Note to the Reader
Prologue
1. A View from the Provinces
2. 'Devices for Thinking about the Past': Playbills, Ephemera, and the Historical Imagination
3. Mapping the Stage: On Kabuki's Cartographic Archive
4. The Playwright at His Desk: Imagining Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Japan
5. Individuality in an Age of Reproduction: the Actor's Image in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Epilogue: Stage and Print in the Digital Age
List of Characters
Biographical Appendix
Biography
Index