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Book Cover
E-book
Author Goree, Robert, author

Title Printing landmarks popular geography and Meisho Zue in late Tokugawa Japan / Robert Goree
Published Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Asia Center, 2020
©2020

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Description 1 online resource
Series Harvard East Asian monographs ; 437
Harvard East Asian monographs ; 437.
Contents The reader as virtual traveler -- The documentation and display of place -- The book as map -- A geography of abundance -- The Ritō network and the long shadow of Miyako meisho zue
Summary "Printing Landmarks tells the story of the late Tokugawa period's most distinctive form of popular geography: meisho zue. Beginning with the publication of Miyako meisho zue in 1780, these monumental books deployed lovingly detailed illustrations and informative prose to showcase famous places (meisho) in ways that transcended the limited scope, quality, and reliability of earlier guidebooks and gazetteers. Putting into spellbinding print countless landmarks of cultural significance, the makers of meisho zue created an opportunity for readers to experience palpable encounters with places located all over the Japanese archipelago. In this groundbreaking multidisciplinary study, Robert Goree draws on diverse archival and scholarly sources to explore why meisho zue enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity. Examining their readership, compilation practices, illustration techniques, cartographic properties, ideological import, and production networks, Goree finds that the appeal of the books, far from accidental, resulted from specific choices editors and illustrators made about form, content, and process. Spanning the fields of book history, travel literature, map history, and visual culture, Printing Landmarks provides a new perspective on Tokugawa-period culture by showing how meisho zue depicted inspiring geographies in which social harmony, economic prosperity, and natural stability made for a peaceful polity"-- Provided by publisher
Subject Akisato, Ritō, active 1780-1814.
Books and reading -- Japan -- History
Cultural geography -- Japan
Publishers and publishing -- Japan -- History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781684176267
1684176263