Interdisciplinary EDO: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Modern Japan

Interdisciplinary Edo brings together scholars from across the methodological spectrum to explore new approaches to innovative humanistic research on early modern Japan (1603-1868). It makes an intervention in the field by thinking across conventional disciplinary boundaries toward a holistic and cohesive approach to Japan’s early modern period. By taking historical, religious, literary, and art historical analyses into account, the contributors hope to begin a new, transdisciplinary conversation on political formation, social interaction, and cultural proliferation under the ＂Great Peace＂ of the Tokugawa regime.

This book comprises 14 essays by specialists of history, literature, religious studies, and art history. Major topics include Edo-period Japan’s cultural, intellectual, and economic connections to the early modern world; environmental humanities and material culture; popular culture and aesthetics; and the question of how contemporary academic demarcation lines impact the current study of Tokugawa Japan. Individual essays range in scale from individual paintings and works of prose fiction to the tectonic plates underlying the Yamashiro basin and span topics from overseas medicinal exchange and premodern cartography to the history of intoxication.

Interdisciplinary Edo will be of immediate interest to all scholars focusing on the early modern period, as well as to researchers studying other periods of Japanese studies. As part of an ongoing and inclusive process of pluralizing and deprovincializing global conceptions of early modernity, this book will contribute to historiographical interventions outside Japan studies as well.

Joshua Schlachet is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, where he teaches courses on Japanese history, dietary cultures, and everyday life. He is a historian of early modern Japan, specializing in the cultural history of food and nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His monograph in progress, Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan, examines the emergence of dietary common knowledge and its engagement with social hierarchy, economic productivity, and moral cultivation.

William C. Hedberg is an Associate Professor of Japanese literature at Arizona State University. His primary focus is the Japanese reception of Chinese fiction and drama during the early modern period, and he is the author of The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon (2019). His current research project focuses on the literature and culture of travel in Edo-period Japan, with special emphasis on Japanese perceptions of the Manchu conquest of the Ming.