This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud

This Perversion Called Love positions one of Japan's most canonical and best translated 20th century authors at the center of contemporary debates in feminism. Examining sexual perversion in Tanizaki's aesthetic essays, cultural criticism, cinema writings and short novels from the 1930s, it argues that Tanizaki understands human subjectivity in remarkably Freudian terms, but that he is much more critical than Freud about what it means for the possibility of love. According to Tanizaki, perversion involves not the proliferation of interesting gender positions, but rather the tragic absence of even two sexes, since femininity is only defined as man's absence, supplement, or complement. In this fascinating work, author Margherita Long reads Tanizaki with a theoretical complexity he demands but has seldom received. As a critique of the historicist and gender-focused paradigms that inform much recent work in Japanese literary and cultural studies, This Perversion Called Love offers exciting new interpretations that should spark controversy in the fields of feminist theory and critical Asian studies.

Author: Margherita Long
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 10/08/2009
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780804762335

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 12/04/2009 pg. 17
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2010 pg. 256

About the Author
Margherita Long is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages at the University of California, Riverside. She specializes in modern Japanese literature and film.