Royall Tyler

Two hundred and twenty tales from medieval Japan—tales that welcome us into a fabulous faraway world populated by saints, scoundrels, ghosts, magical healers, and a vast assortment of deities and demons. Stories of miracles, visions of hell, jokes, fables, and legends, these tales reflect the Japanese civilization. They ably balance the lyrical and the dramatic, the ribald and the profound, offering a window into a long-vanished culture. With black-and-white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

Japanese Tales

安岡章太郎

Spanning the turbulent era from before World War II to just after its end, a collection of ten short stories, including the title tale, by the acclaimed Japanese writer explores the common themes of self-perception and illusion.

The Glass Slipper and Other Stories

Takehiko Fukunaga

Flowers of Grass is Takehiko Fukunaga’s fully realized portrait of a young man of fastidious intelligence and great sorrow, and shows us how it is possible, seeing reality from the side of death and despair, to still choose life. Outside Tokyo, a tuberculosis sanatorium in the village of K has a six-bed ward that the narrator, an aspiring poet, shares with a student of linguistics and budding writer named Shiomi. After the stubborn Shiomi insists on undergoing a dangerous surgical procedure and dies in the process, two notebooks turn up in his bed-sheets. Flowers of Grass unfolds as the narrator reads them, asking himself if Shiomi’s death was a sort of suicide, and learning the details of his late friend’s two great loves: for a brother and sister, both of whom reject him. Fukunaga himself spent seven years recuperating from tuberculosis following World War II, and drew on his own experiences to create a fully realized portrait of a young man of fastidious intelligence and great sorrow, and how it is possible, seeing reality from the side of death and despair, to still choose life.

Flowers of Grass

Morrison considers the sources of strength and dignity that allow people to grow old gracefully and to retain a joy for life.

Murasaki Shikibu

Murasaki

The first translation of the Japanese masterpiece in a generation introduces modern readers to this brilliant account of courtly life in medieval Japan, in an edition that also features line drawings, notes, glossaries, maps, character lists, and chr

The Tale of Genji

The Contrast, written in 1787 by Royall Tyler, is an American play in the tradition of the English Restoration comedies of the seventeenth century; it takes its cue from Sheridan's The School for Scandal, a British comedy of manners that had revived that tradition a decade before. Royall uses the form to satirize Americans who follow British fashions and indulge in 'British vices'. Thus, the play is often concerned with portraying the contrast between Europe and America.

The Contrast

Anonymous

Michael Watson

Tale of the Heike

These seven essays by the most recent English translator of The Tale of Genji emphasize three major interpretive issues. What is the place of the hero (Hikaru Genji) in the work? What story gives the narrative underlying continuity and form? And how does the closing section of the tale (especially the ten "Uji chapters") relate to what precedes it? Written over a period of nine years, the essays suggest fresh, thought-provoking perspectives on Japan's greatest literary classic.

Essays on The Tale of Genji

The Disaster of the Third Princess

Cynthia A. Kierner

“The Contrast“, which premiered at New York City's John Street Theater in 1787, was the first American play performed in public by a professional theater company. The play, written by New England-born, Harvard-educated, Royall Tyler was timely, funny, and extremely popular. When the play appeared in print in 1790, George Washington himself appeared at the head of its list of hundreds of subscribers. Reprinted here with annotated footnotes by historian Cynthia A. Kierner, Tyler’s play explores the debate over manners, morals, and cultural authority in the decades following American Revolution. Did the American colonists' rejection of monarchy in 1776 mean they should abolish all European social traditions and hierarchies? What sorts of etiquette, amusements, and fashions were appropriate and beneficial? Most important, to be a nation, did Americans need to distinguish themselves from Europeans—and, if so, how? Tyler was not the only American pondering these questions, and Kierner situates the play in its broader historical and cultural contexts. An extensive introduction provides readers with a background on life and politics in the United States in 1787, when Americans were in the midst of nation-building. The book also features a section with selections from contemporary letters, essays, novels, conduct books, and public documents, which debate issues of the era.

Manners, Morals, and Authority in the Early American Republic

Japanese nõ theatre or the drama of 'perfected art' flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries largely through the genius of the dramatist Zeami. An intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume and language, the dramas address many subjects, but the idea of 'form' is more central than 'meaning' and their structure is always ritualized. Selected for their literary merit, the twenty-four plays in this volume dramatize such ideas as the relationship between men and the gods, brother and sister, parent and child, lover and beloved, and the power of greed and desire. Revered in Japan as a cultural treasure, the spiritual and sensuous beauty of these works has been a profound influence for English-speaking artists including W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Benjamin Britten.

Japanese Nō Dramas /edited and Translated by Royall Tyler

Being the First Part of a Series of Letters Written by an American Youth, During Nine Months' Residence in the City of London ...

The Yankey in London

In this annotated translation and study of an early fourteenth-century Japanese devotional picture scroll set, Royall Tyler illuminates the complex relationships between medieval Japanese religion and politics, text, and art. The Kasuga Gongen genki ("The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity") mingles text and painting on silk to tell the tale of miraculous events at the Kasuga shrine in Nara, a site favored by the dominant Fujiwara clan for centuries. The work's values are aristocratic, but the text sheds light on the syncretic nature of the era's religious practices, allowing Tyler to collapse the distinction between high and low forms of medieval Japanese religion. Tyler provides a detailed examination of the scrolls, the shrine, and their history and political role. He also elucidates the scrolls' relationship to literary genre and religious practice, including the interaction between Shintoism and Buddhism. His copious annotations describe the work's historical context, as well as its religious and cultural influences. This study is essential for scholars of religion, art historians, and cultural historians alike.

The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity

Algerine Captive ; Or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Rich in titles on English life and social history, this collection spans the world as it was known to eighteenth-century historians and explorers. Titles include a wealth of travel accounts and diaries, histories of nations from throughout the world, and maps and charts of a world that was still being discovered. Students of the War of American Independence will find fascinating accounts from the British side of conflict. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library W037164 A novel. Dedication to David Humphreys signed: Updike Underhill. June 20, 1797. Attributed to Royall Tyler in the Dictionary of American biography. Vol. 1: xxiii, [2], 26-214, [2] p.; v. 2: ix, [4], 14-241, [3] p. Errata notes for both volumes, v. 2, p Printed at Walpole, Newhampshire: by David Carlisle, Jun. and sold at his bookstore, 1797. 2v.; 12°

Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines. [three Lines from Shakespeare] Vol. I[-II]. Published According to Act of Congress. of 2; Volume 2

The Algerine Captive; Or, the Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill

A predecessor of both the nativist humor of Mark Twain and the exotic adventure stories of Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Richard Dana, Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive is an entertaining romp through eighteenth-century society, a satiric look at a variety of American types, from the backwoods schoolmaster to the southern gentleman, and a serious exposé of the horrors of the slave trade. “In stylistic purity and the clarity with which Tyler investigates and dramatizes American manners,” the critic Jack B. Moore has noted, The Algerine Captive “stands alone in our earliest fiction.” It is also one of the first attempts by an American novelist to depict the Islamic world, and lays bare a culture clash and diplomatic quagmire not unlike the one that obtains between the United States and Muslim nations today.

The Algerine Captive, Or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines

The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, 6 Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines

The Algerine Captive

One of the first American novels and the first American novel to be published outside America, The Algerine Captive is the fictitious memoir of Updike Underhill, a picaresque Yankee who, after a spate of adventures at home, goes to sea and is ultimately taken captive by the Algerines. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines. (1797) A Facsimile Reproduction of the London Ed. of 1802, with an Introd

After the Revolutionary War, American sailors lost the protection of Britain's Royal Navy and were easy prey for the pirates of the North African coast, who captured ships and cargo, enslaved crew, and demanded ransom from the U.S. Motivated by these events, Royall Tyler, the first American-born playwright, poet, and novelist, wrote ""The Algerine Captive."" Originally published anonymously in 1797, it tells the tale of fictitious Boston native Dr. Updike Underhill, his capture by Barbary pirates, and their efforts to convert him to their Muslim faith. Written in an entertaining and satiric style that predated Mark Twain, Tyler's novel reveals his patriotic pride and anti-slavery beliefs. His comments on the religious and cultural divide between Western and Islamic beliefs of the day still resonate today.

He wrote the first American comedy to be performed onstage, and here, in this extraordinary but sadly little-remembered 1797 novel, he anticipates the great literature of the coming American century. Here, in two volumes in one book, Royall Tyler tells the astonishing-and thoroughly fictional-tale of Boston gentleman and scholar Updike Underhill, whose life encompasses such extremes as fumblings with Greek poetry that almost lead him to a deadly duel and a stint as a surgeon on a slave ship. One of the first works of fiction to feel uniquely American, this combination of satire and sincerity begins, in Volume 1, as a comedy of manners and genteel adventure the likes of which Mark Twain would later make his own, and transforms, in Volume 2, into a sober tale of abolition and a striking consideration of what it meant, in those early days of the nation, to be an American. Fans of American literature should consider this a must-read. American playwright ROYALL TYLER (1757-1826), born William Clark Tyler, wrote many other plays, some of which have been lost, as well as novels, essays, and humorous verse.

Royall Tyler

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