Pleasure in Profit - by Laura Moretti (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>In the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers' hunger for books that promised them potent knowledge. However, traditional literary histories of this period position the writings of Ihara Saikaku at center stage, largely neglecting the breadth of popular prose. <p/>In the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers across the spectrum of literacies and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers with vital ethical, religious, societal, and interpersonal knowledge. She recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world. Crucially, Moretti shows, readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Drawing on a rich variety of archival materials to present a vivid portrait of seventeenth-century Japanese publishing, <i>Pleasure in Profit</i> also speaks to broader conversations about the category of the literary by offering a new view of popular prose that celebrates plurality.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>What Moretti has given us is a magnificent guidebook through the maze of popular publications of the 17th century . . . <i>Pleasure in Profit</i> is a major work that not only successfully challenges traditional scholarship on this period but also offers both new information and new approaches to understanding early modern Japanese culture.--The Seventeenth Century<br><br>Moretti dismantles the age-old, simplistic contrast between what is entertaining or aesthetic versus what is instructive or didactic when she concludes that books that were issued for monetary gain provided their readers with the pleasures of other kinds of profit, such as the self-confidence and even joy that can come from learning new and useful things. This book is impressive in both scope and sophistication. Highly recommended.--Choice Reviews<br><br><i>Pleasure in Profit </i>is refreshingly ambitious in its framing, and Moretti skillfully treads the fine line between a meticulous academic work, and a book that can hold appeal to a wider audience. Among the detailed analysis there is for the modern reader--like the 17th-century Edo conduct-book reader--an opportunity for escapism: Moretti's work transports a reader elsewhere and allows them, even briefly, to glimpse the world through another's eyes.--Asian Review of Books<br><br>Moretti's volume is an excellent introduction to and survey of cheap print in seventeenth‐century Japan. It also offers a series of fascinating parallels and contrasts for the anglophone scholar of European book history. It is intensively researched, clearly written and clearly argued. Its dialogue is both with scholars of Japanese culture and with scholars working on cheap print more broadly. For the scholar of book history and of popular culture whose emphasis is predominantly European, this is an invaluable work.--Renaissance Studies<br><br>Laura Moretti is an intensely learned guide through a forest of underappreciated popular prose books. She shows how didactic texts shaped the lives and fantasies of Japanese across class lines during the early decades of print, forever changing our view of publishers, audiences, and their multiple literacies.--Linda Chance, author of <i>Ōoku: The Secret World of the Shogun's Women</i><br><br>The world of popular literature is often dismissed by scholarship, but it is precisely within the mundane that we are able to catch a glimpse of the authentic. Only by taking didactic prose seriously can we discover how the intellectual elite's ideas percolate down and influence the everyman. Moretti has put the study of early modern Japanese literature on an entirely new footing.--Richard Bowring, author of <i>In Search of the Way: Thought and Religion in Early-Modern Japan</i><br><br>Drawing on sources from etiquette manuals to literary works--and, tellingly, books that are both at once--<i>Pleasure in Profit</i> offers a nuanced portrait of popular publishing in seventeenth-century Japan, highlighting simultaneously its particularity and its echoes of European contexts. I can't imagine a more lucid, approachable, and grounded treatment of the topic.--Michael Emmerich, author of <i>The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature</i><br><br>In this exemplary study, Laura Moretti challenges the conventional wisdom in her choice of texts (outside the literary canon), in her treatment of genres (as 'porous'), and in her approach (comparative). Her book should appeal to students of comparative literature as well as to specialists on Japan.--Peter Burke, author of <i>Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe</i><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Laura Moretti is senior lecturer in premodern Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. She is the author of <i>Recasting the Past: An Early Modern "Tales of Ise" for Children</i> (2016).
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