The time frame of this volume extends from 200 to 1500 CE, and we see East Asia forming a region with both common features and distinct characteristics of each of the three countries – China, Japan, and Korea – with their internal historical complexities. There has been a general consensus among Chinese critics and scholars almost since the Mid-Tang period that Li Bo (701–762) and Du Fu (712–770) are the greatest poets not only of Tang, but of all classical Chinese literature. The first emperor of the Song dynasty, Zhao Kuangyin (927–976), was an army officer in the Later Zhou, one of the ten kingdoms of the period, and he became emperor through a coup d'état in the year 960. In 1271, Kublai Khan (1215–1294), a grandson of Genghis Khan (1162–1227), formally established the Yuan dynasty, the first foreign dynasty to rule the whole of China, with Khanbaliq (modern-day Beijing) as the capital.  

With its written language and culture, especially neo-Confucianism, exerting a significant influence in East Asia, China occupied a position of central importance, which led some scholars to call East Asia of that period a Sinosphere. The most important school in Late Ming literature is the Gong'an school, so named because the leading writers of this school, the three Yuan brothers, came from Gong'an, Hubei Province. Like poetry and prose, drama and fiction had a similar trajectory from decline at the early period of the Ming dynasty to gradual resuscitation in the Mid-Ming, and a vigorous development during the Late Ming period. Demanded by people in different social strata and thriving in imperial courts as well as the marketplaces of commoners, drama developed as a popular genre and reached a splendid height in the Late Ming period.  

Modernization and the preservation of traditional culture and sociopolitical systems became major issues for all East Asian countries, and they embarked on very different roads in their development and historical destinies. The traditional “Sinosphere” with the Chinese written language and culture at the center changed into a very different East Asian region of a globalized world, and in literature and culture, Western influence replaced Chinese in all of East Asia. Poetry was the major form of literary expression and continued to be written with a great variety of styles. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao are also important figures in the “revolution of poetry.” New Youth quickly became the most influential journal of the May Fourth new culture movement. New poetry had a remarkable development in the years after the Cultural Revolution, representing ideas and sentiments of most people in the “new era.”  

Boken som mitt kapitel ingår i beskrivs på följande sätt i baksidestexten:

Den flytande världen (ukiyo) är ett begrepp inom buddhismen, som står för den härvarande världens farhågot och sorger liksom dess obeständighet. Från mitten av 1600-talet kom begreppet att också beteckna Edotidens nöjesliv och förlustelser, där ögonblick och stunder av njutning sågs lika dömda att förflyktigas i tidens ström.

Nöjesvärlden var nära kopplad till städernas framväxt. En kort bakgrundsskiss av staden Edo (nuvarande Tokyo) och dess framväxt beskrivs liksom de särskilda omgärdade nöjesenklaverna, där Yoshiwara i Edo var det mest berämda och beryktade. Här möter vi bordeller och tehus dessutom teatrar och badhus i den omgivande staden och får en inblick i synen på erotik. I fyra separata kapitel behandlas mer ingående tidens populärlitteratur, den omsvärmade kabuki-teatern, musiken och dess utövare, samt modet med dess dräkter och accessoarer. 

Boken är rikt illustrerad med foton och träsnittsbilder.

This volume consists of articles on imagery in the poetry of various literary canons. Focussing on figurative speech, the authors analyse poetry of the Near East, Greece, the Arabic world, early modern Spain, classical China and classical Japan. The articles present new research based on individual approaches for each particular canon within a wide span from socio-cultural environment to semantic and cognitive properties of specific images. They deal with the poetics of the other, the role of the poet, poetic persuasion in politics, traditional typologies of tropes, intertextuality, and the principle of analogy. The authors combine literary theory with specialised knowledge of the local context and literary tradition and provide innovative and dynamic close readings.