Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan 1700-1820 (Essays in Art and Culture)

This book offers a new assessment of the genre of Japanese paintings and prints today known as shunga. Recent changes in Japanese law have at last enabled erotic images to be published without fear of prosecution, but there has been very little attempt to situate the imagery within the contexts of sexuality, gender, or power. Timon Screech seeks to reestablish shunga in its proper historical contexts of culture and creativity. He opens up for us the strange world of sexual fantasy in the Edo culture of 18th-century Japan and investigates the tensions in class and gender of those that made-and made use of-shunga.Timon Screech is a senior lecturer in the history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, U.K.