Entertaining Virtue: Gender, Personification, and the Naturalization of Confucianism in Edo Print Culture

The Utagawa school of printmakers was the dominant creative force in ukiyo-e woodblock prints in the nineteenth century. Founded by Utagawa Toyoharu (1735-1814) during the second half of the eighteenth century, the school flourished and its members came to define every sub-genre of woodblock prints. This dissertation goes beyond standardized approaches to the study of individual artists of the Utagawa school, or focused study of their thematic output, to instead investigate how the school and its individual members employed specific strategies involving artistic lineage, Utagawa "brand" recognition, and creative specializations that allowed the school and its members to find unparalleled success and fame within the highly competitive publishing industry of Edo Japan. This dissertation begins by investigating how the school and its members worked together to establish a continual artistic lineage based not only in the previous ukiyo-e schools of the Torii and Katsukawa lineages, but also mimicking strategies employed by the official Kan? school. The strategy where this is most evident is in the unique appearance of shini-e, or memorial prints, produced at the death of the school's most prominent members. The production of memorial prints of the artists of the school helped to establish and disseminate a lineage and history of the Utagawa name that elevated its artists from simple craftsmen. To help achieve this elevated status and build market success, the school's members-starting with its founder Toyoharu- utilized the poetic connotations of their artistic name and employed visual and textual strategies that identified them as Utagawa, creating a distinct "brand." The brand was further solidified by the establishment and codification of a recognizable Utagawa-style of kabuki actor prints by Utagawa Toyokuni (1769-1825). Through these strategies, the Utagawa name constantly and positively reinforced a dynamic artistic legacy and is inextricably linked to the entertainments of Edo. Like Toyokuni, other individual artists working under the Utagawa name established creative specialties, which were reinforced in their own work as well as that of their fellow members. Success in individual specialties gave rise to collaborative designs. Utagawa-school artists and related publishers were able to capitalize on the wide recognition its artists had previously gained for certain artistic specialties, demonstrating how these collaborations constituted a distinct, but flexible genre of ukiyo-e prints with fresh variations produced for customers ever eager to be on trend.