1st Edition

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature

Edited By Rachael Hutchinson, Leith Douglas Morton Copyright 2016
364 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

364 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

364 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach to the content, the chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to... Read more

INTRODUCTION

SECTION 1: LITERATURE, SPACE AND TIME

1. Space and Time in Modern Japanese Literature, Stephen Dodd

2. Literature Short on Time: Modern Moments in Haiku and Tanka, Jon Holt

3. Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and Tokyo Space, Alisa Freeman

4. Inner Pieces: Isolation, Inclusion, and Interiority in Modern Women’s Fiction, Amanda C. Seaman

SECTION 2: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE BODY

5. Queer Reading and Modern Japanese Literature, J. Keith Vincent

6. Feminism and Japanese Literature, Barbara Hartley

7. Nagai Kafū’s feminist perspective, Rachael Hutchinson


SECTION 3: LITERATURE AND POLITICS

8. The Proletarian Literature Movement: Experiment and Experience, Mats Karlsson

9. Writing and Politics: Japanese Literature and the Fifteen Years War (1930-1945), Leith Morton

10. Expedient Conversion? Tenkō in Trans-war Japanese Literature, Mark Williams

11. Reading Unequal Japan-U.S. Relations in Postwar Japanese Fiction, Kota Inoue

SECTION 4: WRITING WAR MEMORY

12. Critical Postwar War Literature: Trauma, Narrative Memory and Responsible History, David Stahl

13. Writing and Remembering the Battle of Okinawa: War Memory and Literature, Kyle Ikeda

14. The Need to Narrate the Tokyo Air Raids: The Literature of Saotome Katsumoto, Justin Aukema

SECTION 5: NATIONAL AND COLONIAL IDENTITIES

15. Abusive Medicine and Continued Culpability: The Japanese Empire and its Aftermaths in East Asian Literatures, Karen Thornber

16. National Literature and Beyond: Mizumura Minae and Hideo Levy, Angela Yiu

17. Listening In: The Languages of the Body in Kim Ch’ang-Saeng’s Crimson Fruit, Catherine Ryu

SECTION 6: BUNJIN and THE BUNDAN

18. Kuki Shūzō as philosopher-poet, Hiroshi Nara

19. ‘The Akutagawa/Tanizaki Debate: Reflections on Bundan Discourse, Rebecca Mak

20. The Rise of Women Writers, the Heisei I-novel, and the Contemporary Bundan, Kendall Heitzman

SECTION 7: LITERATURE AND TECHNOLOGY

21. Electronic Literature and Youth Culture: The Rise of the Japanese Cell Phone Novel, Kelly Hansen

22. Narrative in the Digital Age: from Light Novels to Web Serials, Satomi Saito

23. Japanese Twitterature: Global Media, Formal Innovation, Cultural Differance, Jonathan E. Abel


 

Biography

Rachael Hutchinson is an Associate Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Delaware, USA.

Leith Douglas Morton is a Professor Emeritus at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan.

"The Routledge Handbook is particularly refreshing because it does not tackle Japanese literature from an exclusively chronological perspective. Instead, the essays are grouped thematically, creating sections on space and time, gender and sexuality, identity, technology and several others. As Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton aptly argue in their introduction, it is this inclusion of significant sections on queer and female fiction that differentiates this handbook from its predecessors and makes it truly up-to-date."

Alice French, The Japan Society