The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

Author: Nishio Kinko
Publisher:
Publication 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 the present, separately exploring the formation process of unique characteristics of Japanese modern literature such as "landscape," "interior," "confession," "pathology," "childhood," and "narrative methods." He digs into the origins of literary modernity, revealing the symbiotic relationship between modern literature and modern nation-states. Once modern literature establishes itself, its origins are forgotten. This forgetting leads people to believe that the fundamental concepts of this literature possess historical universality, which in turn acquires an unchallenged hegemonic status, thereby excluding any "non-modernity" and arbitrarily segmenting, reversing, and reassembling any pre-modern elements.