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| | Ryu abstract (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29) |
 | | The reader can indeed be transported to Heian Japan, while savoring from the sumptuous literary plate proffered by Dalby's novel of 420 pages the delightfully mixed flavors of the time-honored Heian classics--Genji monogatari, Murasaki Shikibu nikki, Makura no soshi, and Eiga monogatari, just to name a few. |
 | | Yet another kind of enjoyment can be had from Dalby's novelistic rendition of Heian splendor and Murasaki Shikibu's life, once the reader becomes keenly aware of how Dalby utilizes, subverts, and expands the grand narrative that has been governing the reified Heian textual and ideological fields in Western scholarship over the last century. |
 | | The Tale of Murasaki, a chronicle of Murasaki Shikibu's lifelong obsession with her Genji monogatari, is Dalby's own way of settling the age-old controversy that has troubled the Japanese cultural imagination over the centuries: how was Murasaki, a mere woman, able to produce such a masterpiece? |
| ase.tufts.edu /asian/japanese/ajls/Abstracts/ryu.html (299 words) |
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