Mario Talamo

After a BA and an MA in Japanese Studies at the University of Naples ‘l’Orientale’, I earned a Ph.D. in Southern and Eastern Asia at the same university with a dissertation on the selling strategies and the commercialization of literary product during the late Edo period, with particular focus on Jippensha Ikku’s (1765-1831) activity and on his masterpiece titled Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (1802-09). Following the Italian practice at the time, I spent the first two years of my Ph.D. course studying at Keiō University, enrolled as researcher. My study focused on the Edo-period literature and I was trained mainly by Professor Ishikawa Tōru who taught me how to read Japanese calligraphy (hentaigana and kuzushuji) in order to access and to decode manuscripts and printed texts. Since November 2014 I am preparing my postdoctoral dissertation at the Fifth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. My academic interests concern mainly the late Edo period Gesaku (playful writings), with specific focus on the literary production issued during the Bunka, Bunsei and Tenpō periods (1804-44). My current research activity dwells upon the late Edo intellecual history and the secularization of mainstream literary products, such as chūhon, kibyōshi, gōkan, and the like, and the consequential changes in the ethical, intellectual and receptive paradigms between the two Reforms of Kansei (1787-93) and Tenpō (1841-43) periods and the end of the Tokugawa shogunate (1853). I work with a focus on late eighteenth and nineteenth-century prose but not only. Other research interests include intertextuality; selling strategies and commercialization of literary products in the early modern book industry; early-modern paleography and reception studies.