Inside the Floating World presents an overview of Japanese social history from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries using images of children, actors, courtesans, and landscape. All of the most eminent woodblock artists are featured, including Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Utmaro. In the last two decades, visual culture of our own time has come under the scrutiny of specialists from such diverse disciplines as anthropology, sociology, film studies, psychology, comparative literature studies, and art history. Methodologies and critical practices have emerged from each discipline that focus on the wide range of experiences contemporary visual culture offers to its consumers. Inside the Floating World affords a unique opportunity to bring these recent critical approaches to bear on the historical and aesthetic issues surrounding japanese printmaking. The book serves as both an introduction to and a serious explication of the social meanings imbedded in Japanese prints. Allen Hockley is associate professor of art history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Prints of Isoda Koryusai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan.