Origins of Modern Japanese Literature -- Academic Frontiers

Author: Nishio Katsuhiko
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 the present, exploring the formation processes of unique characteristics in Japanese modern literature such as "landscape," "interior," "confession," "pathology," "childhood," and "narrative methods." He uncovers the origins of literary modernity, suggesting 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 its fundamental concepts possess historical universality, which in turn acquires an unproven hegemonic status, thereby excluding any "non-modernity" and arbitrarily segmenting, reversing, and recombining any pre-modern elements.