...Joseph Lavery “ The Mikado' s Queer Realism: Law, Genre, Knowledge” offers a hermeneutic history of the Gilbert and Sullivan light opera, arguing that the now ubiquitous assertion that it is not “about Japan” became critical only in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War and reflected a pervasive...

... that a light opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado (1885)—a form of representation famously defined by its anti-referentiality (Orientalism)—makes claims about the real world and discloses the imprint of realpolitik upon its shape. By insisting on the imaginariness of Orientialism's referent, defenders...

... “in its generality” that the novel is “true,” while “its particulars are merely imaginary” ( 62 ). The compelling realism of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885), Lavery argues, is not to be found in the verisimilitude or referentiality of “a line about Japan.” Rather, Lavery offers a theory...