"Winner of the NAVSA Best Book of the Year, North American Victorian Studies Association" Grace E. Lavery is assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Program in Critical Theory and the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
How Japan captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western aesthetics
From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. Quaint, Exquisite explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization.
Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, textual criticism, and a wealth of in-depth archival research, Grace Lavery provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the "subjective universal" condition of aesthetic judgment. The book features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats's prized katana sword and the "Japanese vellum" luxury editions of Oscar Wilde.
Quaint, Exquisite provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino. "Quaint, Exquisite is a beautifully written book. . . . [Lavery] is an invigorating, compelling collaborative critical voice which demands, and amply repays, the reader's time and thought."---Gail Marshall, Times Higher Education "[Lavery's] musings are worlds away from the archival explorations and excavations preoccupying most Victorianists now. But both approaches, hands-on and theoretical, are valid and valuable . . . . Grace Lavery combines them, most eloquently when reading individual works. That is rather a rare skill."---Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement "This is a remarkable and distinctive piece of work-extremely smart, wide-ranging, and provocative. It challenges received wisdom on many fronts, exploring the power of Japan as a realm of fantasy that animates late-Victorian and modernist aesthetics, as well as the organization of queer desire."-James Eli Adams, Columbia University "Quaint, Exquisite is a genuinely exciting work, impressive for the originality of its archive and approach, its conceptual energy, and its brio. Besides Victorianists and modernists, it should command the attention of anyone working across or beyond historical fields in queer theory, affect theory, and aesthetic theory."-Daniel Hack, University of Michigan "Quaint, Exquisite persuasively shows us how nineteenth-century ideas about Japan led to aesthetic categories that extend well beyond Japaneseness and the nineteenth century. Lavery eloquently demonstrates that universal experiences of violent beauty and minor consequence are rooted in particular histories of East-West encounter and fantasies of encounter. She locates Japan in the way Anglophone culture thinks and feels about art."-Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University
