TY - BOOK ID - 73233381 TI - Parody, irony and ideology in the fiction of Ihara Saikaku AU - Gundry, David James AU - Brill PY - 2017 SN - 9789004343054 PB - Leiden Boston Brill DB - UniCat KW - Parody. KW - Irony in literature. KW - Ihara, Saikaku, KW - Criticism and interpretation. KW - Moral. KW - Ironie. KW - Parodie. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:73233381 AB - The first monograph published in English on Ihara Saikaku's fiction, David J. Gundry's lucid, compelling study examines the tension reflected in key works by Edo-period Japan's leading writer of "floating world" literature between the official societal hierarchy dictated by the Tokugawa shogunate's hereditary status-group system and the era's de facto, fluid, wealth-based social hierarchy. The book's nuanced, theoretically engaged explorations of Saikaku's narratives' uses of irony and parody demonstrate how these often function to undermine their own narrator's intermittent moralizing. Gundry also analyzes these texts' depiction of the fleeting pleasures of love, sex, wealth and consumerism as Buddhistic object lessons in the illusory nature of phenomenal reality, the mastery of which leads to a sort of enlightenment. ER -