Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan 1700-1820

Description

This revised and expanded second edition of Timon Screech's definitive Sex and the Floating World offers a new assessment of the genre of erotic Japanese paintings and prints known as shunga. Changes in Japanese law in the 1990s enabled such images to be published without fear of prosecution, and many shunga picture-books have since appeared. Shunga prints are not like any other form of picture for the simple fact that they are overtly about sex.

Timon Screech is Professor in the History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and Senior Associate at the Sainsbury Institute for the study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. His books include The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (1996) and The Shogun's Painted Culture (Reaktion, 2000).

With concern, proportion, wit and a bit of levity, the author of this authoritative and invaluable contribution to scholarship has given us the book for which we have long waited. -- Donald Richie, Japan Times Screech provides a fascinating and informative introduction to the social and sexual habits of pre-modern Japan, copiously illustrated and full of witty anecdotes as well as solid scholarly research. The ideal bedtime read? Insight Japan