Kissing the Mask
Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater
On Sale: 03/15/2011
Kissing the Mask
Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater
On Sale: 03/15/2011
Format:
About the Book
“Intrepid journalist and novelist William T. Vollman’s colossal body of work stands unsurpassed for its range, moral imperative, and artistry.”
—Booklist
William T. Vollmann, the National Book Award–winning author of Europe Central, offers a charming, evocative, and piercing examination of the ancient Japanese tradition of Noh theatre and the keys it holds to our modern understanding of beauty. Kissing the Mask is the first major book on Noh by an American writer since the 1916 publication the classic study Pisan Cantos and the Noh by Ezra Pound. But Kissing the Mask is pure Vollman—illustrated with photos by the author with provocative related side-discussions on femininity, transgender, kabuki, pornography, geishas, and more.
Critical Praise
“The performance of female characters by male Noh actors sparks a deeply researched, lovingly detailed, and obsessive discourse on the nature of feminine beauty....[A] fervently reflective, probing narrative...[that] rewards it on almost every page.” — Publishers Weekly
“[A] provocative inquiry into beauty and desire... [Vollmann] is a passionate and penetrating observer ... a daring, brilliant, and idiosyncratic quest astonishing in its discernment, scope, and feeling.” — Booklist
“[Vollmann’s] evocations of [Noh’s] death-haunted stories, its eerie masks, its male actors playing women...are so electric and strange, so enchanted, that they made me long for the very dramas that have often sent me toward the exit before the intermission.” — Pico Iyer, New York Times Book Review
“Reward[s] the reader who stays with it for the long trip, the way a travel chronicle does.... Vollmann is not just a writer who admires. He is a writer who looks and touches.” — San Francisco Chronicle
-Product Details
- ISBN: 9780061228490
- ISBN 10: 0061228494
- Imprint: Ecco
- On Sale: 03/15/2011
- Pages: 528
- List Price:25.00 CAD
- BISAC1 : SOCIAL SCIENCE / General
- BISAC2 : SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General
- BISAC3 : PERFORMING ARTS / Dance / Regional & Ethnic
- BISAC4 : PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / General
- BISAC5 : PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism