
Departmental Papers (History of Art)
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
5-1-2016
Publication Source
Manuscript Studies
Volume
1
Issue
1
Start Page
90
Last Page
114
DOI
10.1353/mns.2016.0010
Abstract
The act of rendering the handwritten in print participates in a long tradition of appreciation of calligraphy in East Asia. This essay considers the question of why manuscript remained the mode for representing writing well after the development of print culture in early modern Japan, forcing us to reexamine our expectations of what the term “manuscript” means: must a work be “written by hand” to be a manuscript, for instance? We argue that the use of print technology as a means to capture and disseminate the calligraphic expands the scope of current notions of what a manuscript is and challenges the model of separation between “manuscript” and “print.”
Copyright/Permission Statement
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Keywords
Calligraphy, Japan, Japanese woodblock prints, manuscript studies, manuscript culture, print culture, material text, palaeography, transcription
Recommended Citation
Chance, L. H., & Davis, J. N. (2016). The Handwritten and the Printed: Issues of Format and Medium in Japanese Premodern Books. Manuscript Studies, 1 (1), 90-114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mns.2016.0010
Date Posted: 01 February 2017
This document has been peer reviewed.