Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

From Library Journal

While this work of literary theory, which first appeared in Japanese in 1980, concentrates on the literature and thought of the 1980s, it challenges readers to reinterpret the literature of the entire Meiji Period (1868-1926) in six discrete essays plus a forward by Frederick Jameson and materials added for the English and paperback editions. Karatani (literature, Hosei Univ.) is at his most provocative when discussing the "discovery" of landscape in painting and literature as well as of the child as a human being. In his examinations of such important Meiji writers as Soseki, Kunidida Doppo, Tayama Katai, and Tsubouchi Shoyo, he offers insightful cultural criticism of subjects such as ethnography, religion, language, and modernity in the West and East. This far-reaching and bold reconsideration of Japanese literary history can be appreciated by scholars of modern thought and literature, above all those versed in Japanese studies.

- D.E. Perushek, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville

Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“Karatani Kojin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon Kindai bungaku no kigen) has had a profound effect on the way we formulate the questions we ask about modern literature and culture, and that effect will no doubt be redoubled now that the work is available in a lucid (and carefully annotated) English translation. . . . Karatani’s argument is compelling, moving even, and in the end the reader comes away with a different understanding not only of modern Japanese literature but of modern Japan itself. . .”

--Stephen Snyder, The Journal of Asian Studies

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