TLS touts UC expert's take on Japanese classic
The Times Literary Supplement calls UC associate professor Gergana Ivanova's latest book 'a work of immense value'
The Times Literary Supplement wrote about University of Cincinnati author Gergana Ivanova's book Unbinding The Pillow Book, a critique of a Japanese literary classic.
Ivanova's 2018 book (Columbia University Press) examines the changing ways in which people have related to Sei Shonagon's classic The Pillow Book.
UC professor Gergana Ivanova's "Unbinding The Pillow Book."
"Ivanova describes the ways Sei and her work have been depicted, interpreted, marketed, enjoyed and disliked over a thousand years," The Times' Claire Kohda Hazelton wrote.
Hazelton called Ivanova's literary criticism "a work of immense value." Ivanova's book has received strong reviews elsewhere as well.
"Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, Unbinding The Pillow Book offers a dynamic portrait of one of the most important works of world literature and of the woman who wrote it more than a millennium ago," wrote Michael Emmerich, professor of Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"Unbinding The Pillow Book is an erudite and often entertaining guide to the persona of Sei Shonagon and her peripatetic text, The Pillow Book," Rutgers University professor Paul Schalow wrote. "I cannot think of a better match between a scholar and her subject. It is a dazzling accomplishment."
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