In this book the author attempts to place the Japanese print in a very broad historical setting. He has striven to grasp and transmit an understanding of Japanese popular culture from its inception in the fifteenth century to the formation of the ukiyo-e school in the late seventeenth century--through the florishing period of the ukiyo-e print in the eighteenth century, and into the nineteenth century, when it was absorbed into the culture of modern times. The later prints are treated in a new way. No longer are they put into the category of a "decline" and "downfall," where most of the earlier critics and historians put them. The author recognizes the late period as one of social disintegration and cultural chaos, but he conceives of it as a transition--as a sort of revolution or renaissance of popular art, and the significance of the renaissance is emphasized.