Origin of Modern Japanese Literature

Author: Natsuki Takahashi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: This book is not a scholarly monograph on literary history, but a collection of theoretical critical essays. Published in 1980, it has been reprinted 25 times and has become a classic work of postmodern criticism. The author critiques literary modernity to dissect it, separately exploring the formation processes of unique characteristics of Japanese modern literature such as "landscape," "interior," "freedom," "pathology," "childhood," and "narrative methods." He digs into the "origin" of literary modernity and reveals the symbiotic relationship between modern literature and modern nation-states. Once modern literature establishes itself, its "origin" is forgotten. This forgetting leads people to believe that the fundamental concepts of this literature possess historical universality, which in turn gains an unquestioned hegemonic status, thereby excluding any "non-modern" elements and arbitrarily fragmenting, reversing, and reorganizing any pre-modern elements.