The Search for the Beautiful Woman

Name: The Search for the Beautiful Woman
Brand: Bloomsbury Academic
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

By Cho Kyo

0 - Default Title

Description

While a slender body is a prerequisite for beauty today, plump women were considered ideal in Tang Dynasty China and Heian-period Japan. Starting around the Southern Song period in China, bound feet symbolized the attractiveness of women. But in Japan, shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth long were markers of loveliness. For centuries, Japanese culture was profoundly shaped by China, but in complex ways that are only now becoming apparent. In this first full comparative history of the subject, Cho Kyo explores changing standards of feminine beauty in China and Japan over the past two millennia. Drawing on a rich array of literary and artistic sources gathered over a decade of research, he considers which Chinese representations were rejected or accepted and transformed in Japan. He then traces the introduction of Western aesthetics into Japan starting in the Meiji era, leading to slowly developing but radical changes in representations of beauty. Through fiction, poetry, art, advertisements, and photographs, the author vividly demonstrates how criteria of beauty differ greatly by era and culture and how aesthetic sense changed in the course of extended cultural transformations that were influenced by both China and the West.

Product details

Edition:

1

Number of Pages:

302

Release Date:

2012-10-12

Publication Date:

2012-10-12

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Academic

Languages:

Original: English

ISBN10:

1442218932

ISBN13:

9781442218932

GPSR Manufacturer Reference:

[email protected]

Weight:

649 g

Height:

161 cm

Width:

234 cm

Thickness:

29 cm

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