Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

Lewis, Diane Wei

ISBN 10: 0674241150 / ISBN 13: 9780674241152

Published by Harvard University Asia Center (edition ), 2019

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan (Harvard East Asian Monographs)
• Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center (edition )
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674241150
• ISBN 13: 9780674241152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good

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Synopsis

Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema’s persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and postquake mass media boom. The earthquake transformed the Japanese film industry and lent urgency to debates surrounding cinema’s ability to reach a mass audience and shape public sentiment, while the rise of consumer culture contributed to alarm over rampant materialism and “feminization.”

Demonstrating how ideas about emotion and sexual difference played a crucial role in popular discourse on cinema’s reach and its sensory-affective powers, Powers of the Real offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the “age of the mass society” in Japan.

About the Author

Diane Wei Lewis is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies and Core Faculty in East Asian Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.