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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.
Show moreThe 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.
Show moreINTRODUCTION
SECTION 1: LITERATURE, SPACE AND TIME
1. Space and Time in Modern Japanese Literature
2. Literature Short on Time: Modern Moments in Haiku and Tanka
3. Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and Tokyo
Space
4. Inner Pieces: Isolation, Inclusion, and Interiority in Modern
Women’s Fiction
SECTION 2: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE BODY
5. Queer Reading and Modern Japanese Literature
6. Feminism and Japanese Literature
7. Nagai Kafū’s feminist perspective
SECTION 3: LITERATURE AND POLITICS
8. The Proletarian Literature Movement: Experiment and
Experience
9. Writing and Politics: Japanese Literature and the Fifteen Years
War (1930-1945)
10. Expedient Conversion? Tenkō in Trans-war Japanese
Literature
11. Reading Unequal Japan-U.S. Relations in Postwar Japanese
Fiction
SECTION 4: WRITING WAR MEMORY
12. Critical Postwar War Literature: Trauma, Narrative Memory
and Responsible History
13. Writing and Remembering the Battle of Okinawa: War Memory and
Literature
14. The Need to Narrate the Tokyo Air Raids: The Literature of
Saotome Katsumoto
SECTION 5: NATIONAL AND COLONIAL IDENTITIES
15. Abusive Medicine and Continued Culpability: The Japanese
Empire and its Aftermaths in East Asian Literatures
16. National Literature and Beyond: Mizumura Minae and Hideo
Levy
17. Listening In: The Languages of the Body in Kim Ch’ang-Saeng’s
Crimson Fruit
SECTION 6: BUNJIN and THE BUNDAN
18. Kuki Shūzō as philosopher-poet
19. ‘The Akutagawa/Tanizaki Debate: Reflections on Bundan
Discourse
20. The Rise of Women Writers, the Heisei I-novel, and the
Contemporary Bundan
SECTION 7: LITERATURE AND TECHNOLOGY
21. Electronic Literature and Youth Culture: The Rise of the
Japanese Cell Phone Novel
22. Narrative in the Digital Age: from Light Novels to Web
Serials
23. Japanese Twitterature: Global Media, Formal Innovation,
Cultural Differance
Rachael Hutchinson is an Associate Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Delaware, USA.
Leith Douglas Morton is a Professor Emeritus at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan.
"The Routledge Handbook is particularly refreshing because it does not tackle Japanese literature from an exclusively chronological perspective. Instead, the essays are grouped thematically, creating sections on space and time, gender and sexuality, identity, technology and several others. As Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton aptly argue in their introduction, it is this inclusion of significant sections on queer and female fiction that differentiates this handbook from its predecessors and makes it truly up-to-date."Alice French, The Japan Society
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