Origins of Modern Japanese Literature -- Academic Frontiers (New Edition)

Author: (Japanese) Nishio Katsuhiko
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
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 since then, becoming a classic work of postmodern criticism. The author critiques literary modernity to dissect the present, separately exploring the formation processes of unique characteristics in Japanese modern literature such as "landscape," "interior," "confession," "pathology," "child," and "narrative methods." He digs into 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 the fundamental concepts of this literature possess historical universality, which then gains an unquestioned hegemonic status, thereby excluding any "non-modern" elements and arbitrarily segmenting, reversing, and reorganizing any pre-modern elements.