This book foregrounds the pressures that three transformative technologies in the long sixteenth century-the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass-placed on long-held literary practices, as well as on cultural and social structures. Sheila J. Nayar disinters the clash between...

"Nakano Kōji pens the door to the treasury of Japanese classics by introducing six writers who are his personal favorites. The writers under his lens span seven centuries, ranging from the twelfth century to the nineteenth. Three are poets; three wrote timeless prose. The hermit-monk Ryōkan, a...