Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Kōjin Karatani
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313236
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Karatani Kojin is one of Japan's leading critics. In his work as a theoretician, he has described Modernity as have few others; he has re-evaluated the literature of the entire Meiji period and beyond. As one critic has said, Karatani's thought "has had a profound effect on the way we formulate the questions we ask about modern literature and culture ... [his] argument is compelling, moving even, and in the end the reader comes away with a different understanding not only of modern Japanese literature but of modern Japan itself." Among the many authors discussed are Soseki Natsume, Doppo Kunikida, Katai Tayama, and Shoyo Tsubouchi.

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Kōjin Karatani
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313236
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Karatani Kojin is one of Japan's leading critics. In his work as a theoretician, he has described Modernity as have few others; he has re-evaluated the literature of the entire Meiji period and beyond. As one critic has said, Karatani's thought "has had a profound effect on the way we formulate the questions we ask about modern literature and culture ... [his] argument is compelling, moving even, and in the end the reader comes away with a different understanding not only of modern Japanese literature but of modern Japan itself." Among the many authors discussed are Soseki Natsume, Doppo Kunikida, Katai Tayama, and Shoyo Tsubouchi.

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan PDF Author: Seth Jacobowitz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Writing Technology in Meiji Japan boldly rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture from the perspective of media history. Drawing upon methodological insights by Friedrich Kittler and extensive archival research, Seth Jacobowitz investigates a range of epistemic transformations in the Meiji era (1868–1912), from the rise of communication networks such as telegraph and post to debates over national language and script reform. He documents the changing discursive practices and conceptual constellations that reshaped the verbal, visual, and literary regimes from the Tokugawa era. These changes culminate in the discovery of a new vernacular literary style from the shorthand transcriptions of theatrical storytelling (rakugo) that was subsequently championed by major writers such as Masaoka Shiki and Natsume Sōseki as the basis for a new mode of transparently objective, “transcriptive” realism. The birth of modern Japanese literature is thus located not only in shorthand alone, but within the emergent, multimedia channels that were arriving from the West. This book represents the first systematic study of the ways in which media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature.

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature PDF Author: Haruo Shirane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316368289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women's literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Rachael Hutchinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317647726
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach to the content, the chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory. The Handbook examines various modes of literary production (such as fiction, poetry, and critical essays) as distinct forms of expression that nonetheless are closely interrelated. Attention is drawn to the idea of the bunjin as a ‘person of letters’ and a more realistic assessment is provided of how writers have engaged with ideas – not labelled a ‘novelist’ or ‘poet’, but a ‘writer’ who may at one time or another choose to write in various forms. The book provides an overview of major authors and genres by situating them within broader themes that have defined the way writers have produced literature in modern Japan, as well as how those works have been read and understood by different readers in different time periods. The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature draws from an international array of established experts in the field as well as promising young researchers. It represents a wide variety of critical approaches, giving the study a broad range of perspectives. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Literature, Sociology, Critical Theory, and History.

Translating Modern Japanese Literature

Translating Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Richard Donovan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527539873
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book presents and comments on four short works of Japanese literature by prominent writers of the early twentieth century, including Natsume Sōseki and Miyazawa Kenji. These are their first-ever published English translations. The book is designed to be used as a textbook for the translation of modern Japanese literature—another first. Each chapter introduces the writer and his work, presents the original Japanese text in its entirety, and encourages students with advanced Japanese to make their own translation of it, before reading the author’s translation that follows. The detailed commentary section in each chapter focuses on two stylistic issues that characterise the source text, and how the target text—the translation—has dealt with them, before the chapter concludes with questions for further discussion and analysis.

The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature

The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: John Whittier Treat
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226811703
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood. Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Sōseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.

Modern Japanese Aesthetics

Modern Japanese Aesthetics PDF Author: Michael F. Marra
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824820770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Modern Japanese Aesthetics is the first work in English on the history of the Japanese philosophy of art, from its inception in the 1870s to the present. In addition to the historical information and discussion of aesthetic issues that appear in the introductions to each of the chapters, the book presents English translations of otherwise inaccessible major works on Japanese aesthetics, beginning with a complete and annotated translation of the first work in the field, Nishi Amane's Bimyogaku Setsu (The Theory of Aesthetics). In its four sections (The Subject of Aesthetics, Aesthetic Categories, Poetic Expression, Postmodernism and Aesthetics), Modern Japanese Aesthetics discusses the momentous efforts made by Japanese thinkers to master, assimilate, and transform Western philosophical systems to discuss their own literary and artistic heritage. Readers are introduced to debates between the unconditional supporters of Western ideas (Onishi Hajime) and more cautious approaches to the literary and artistic past (Okakura Kakuzo, Tsubouchi Shoyo). The institutionalization of aesthetics as an academic subject is discussed and the work of some of Japan's most distinguished professional aestheticians (Onishi Yoshimori, Imamichi Tomonobu), philosophers (Kusanagi Masao, Nishitani Keiji, Sakabe Megumi), and literary critics (Karatani Kojin) is included. Modern Japanese Aesthetics is a sophisticated and energetic volume on the process that led to the construction of aesthetic categories used by Japanese and, later, Western scholars in discussing Japanese literature and arts. This important work will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the formation of a critical vocabulary in Japan. Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader is a companion volume to A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (UH Press, 2001).

The Making of Modern Japan

The Making of Modern Japan PDF Author: Marius B. Jansen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 933

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Book Description
Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.

Writing the Love of Boys

Writing the Love of Boys PDF Author: Jeffrey Angles
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816669694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A pioneering look at same-sex desire in Japanese modernist writing.

Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature

Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Noriko Mizuta Lippit
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351696882
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This title was first published in 1980. In twentieth century Japanese literature, the opposition and interaction of realism and romanticism on the level of literary concepts, and of Marxism and aestheticism (including, in part, modernism) on the level of literary ideology, supplies a most vital basis for writers searching for new methods of literary expression, fostering debates among the writers and creating the setting for active experimentation with style, form and language. This study is a result of an extended stay in the United States by the author who turned increasingly toward questioning and evaluating my own relation to Japan's literary heritage. For Japanese who have witnessed (at least intellectually) the violent attraction to and rejection of foreign cultures of many of their predecessors in the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras, and their final, often sentimental and abstract, glorification of the Japanese cultural heritage, nihon kaiki (return to Japan) still presents enormously complex intellectual as well as emotional problems.